Missouri Classical Music News

• Marimba Ponies (8 meg mpg video)
  
• Takeshi Terauchi and The Bunnys (mp3 audio)
  
• Texas Chainsaw Orchestra (mp3 audio)
  
• Alex Ross also recommends the Ljova version, which you can hear here.

I am a composer living in Kansas City, MO. My wife and I have a house, jobs and 'way too many cats. And twins due in early March. I study composition at UMKC, teach at a local community college, work at the KC Symphony and attempt to render genomic DNA information into sound that might someday resemble music. Maybe. I used to play the clarinet and saxophone pretty regularly, and for a time played in the Colorblind James Experience, the Hotheads and the Whitman/McIntire Duo.

those who thought the Web meant a new future for classical music were right. Classical music is thriving on the Internet. It is just that, like many other things on the Internet, it is not thriving in the form people in the 1990's or early 2000's expected it to take.

You want to read about classical music on the Internet? There are dozens of sites, from ArtsJournal.com, which links to articles in every area of culture, to NewMusicBox.org, which has demonstrated that a serious online music magazine can indeed endure (with, yes, streaming of concerts). You want to listen to classical music? For opera buffs, Operacast.com has a complete list of broadcasts from around the world that you can hear on your computer. Want a reference? Operabase.com unfailingly tells who is singing what where, and the Metropolitan Opera Archives online database (www.metoperafamily.org) is a treasure trove for fans. Want to talk about music? There are message boards for almost every aspect of music. . . .

And for anyone dreaming of creating a business plan around classical music on the Internet, here's another fact: it sells. By conventional wisdom, classical music accounts for 3 to 4 percent of overall recording industry sales. But on Apple's iTunes, the leading site for music downloads, classical music represents 12 percent of sales.

"The percentage has held steady," said Joseph McKesson, a member of the original iTunes team . "If I only had the venture capital to open an online classical music store!"

In a recent Billboard article that should be required reading for everyone in the industry, Anastasia Tsioulcas, the classical music columnist, described the thriving state of classical downloads. She listed several new classical releases with significant percentages of sales through downloads, like the violinist Janine Jansen's recording of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons": 73 percent of its sales were through downloads.

We are interested in studying musical perception ability in the general population. The following test, developed by Isabelle Peretz (University of Montreal), takes less than 10 minutes. It involves listening to pairs of tunes and deciding whether they are the same or different. We will give you your score at the end.

[Prison music director Elvera] Voth often tells reporters of one inmate's astonishment when the choir received a standing ovation. Voth thinks the experience of learning to sing, following the discipline of rehearsals and learning to perform in harmony teaches many inmates to work in a community, an experience they may not have had.

Cohen notes that most of the inmates not only learn to sing and to read music, but they also learn to sing in classical music pieces often in other languages.

The Lawrence concert "How Can I Keep From Singing" will be an eclectic mix of works by Beethoven, Strauss, Schubert, Verdi's "Va Pensiero" (a paraphrase of Psalm 137), "Down to the River to Pray" and "Rap of Redemption: I Wish I Never Hurt You," a unique and powerful blend of an inmate's rap lyrics with Gregorian chants.

In one of her research projects, Cohen interviewed and surveyed inmates and volunteers in the Lansing choir. Her survey indicates "inmates tend to view performing in the choir as learning something about themselves - developing musical and social skills, and expanding their musical tastes - while volunteers reported that they have learned to view inmates as individuals."