Yesterday, I listened to a terrific episode of Radio Open Source, Christopher Lydon’s wide-ranging podcast, on the 100th anniversary of the birth of composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein. The show focused on his popular musical, West Side Story. I have played several arrangements of West Side Story and other Bernstein works in concert band and marching band, and they have been some of my favortite band pieces. The conversation between Lydon and Nigel Simeone is a fascinating analysis of many of the songs in the show and looking at the influences of classical, jazz, and Latin music on Bernstein’s creative process. Check it out!
Music
There are 37 posts filed in Music (this is page 4 of 4).
The effect of music in our lives
Earlier this week, I read a terrific post by Ron Chester on the effect of silence at the end of the performance of a piece of music. I sing in a church choir, and there have been many times that a short silence at the end of a piece can really bring home the feeling of richness to the experience. During the past weekend, I also had two musical experiences that reminded me of the power of live music. I sang at a church retreat, and attended a community band concert. In the retreat, I was moved to tears at one point by one of the songs as I sang. At the band concert, several of the pieces were ones I had played when I was in band in high school or college, and the pieces brought back fond memories of making music with a group. It also helped that the band was excellent, easily the best community band I have ever heard. All of these experiences helped to remind me that having music in my life is an uplifting experience, one that I want to continue to have.
Stars and Stripes Forever – It’s the law!
The Stars and Stripes Forever March is the national march of the United States of America. It’s not just a good idea – it’s the law!
See this article for more background. Also, the Marine Band website has free downloads of Sousa march recordings – neat!
OpenSource.com: New Linux distro for digital artists
Linux Journal: Linux Gets Loud – Overview of music apps available on Linux
How to get started (in programming)
I linked to an article on Linux Journal Saturday discussing how to get started in programming. I think this is a good article for several reasons, one of which is picking a skill to learn and getting started. For me, picking a small thing to create or learn, getting some success and getting that working, helps me to get enthusiastic. I am then ready to pick up a new thing. This is the process I am using to learn the Tone.js Javascript music library. I worked through some of the code examples, then came up with a small project, broke it down into a set of steps, and I am working through them one at a time. Success!
Welcome to Perl.com readers!
For those of you who are coming here from my article on Perl.com titled “Making Perl Reusable with Modules“, welcome! I have continued working with the concepts of Joseph Schillinger that I described in that article. I have created a short Perl script which allows the user to create a MIDI file from a Schillinger resultant. You will need to have the MIDI-Perl and Tk Perl modules installed on your system. The file containing the Perl script is attached to this post as a .txt file. See the file for instructions on how to run the script.