Category: Uncategorized

9 Gateway Pieces to Contemporary Music for Pop Lovers

This list is pretty esoteric but I love it. I don't think the average pop listener has Flying Lotus on rotation, nor would Beat Furrer's Spur be a piece I would use to introduce contemporary classical idioms to the uninitiated. But maybe most people who listen to some of the "pop" on this list are acquainted with some of the more standard classical rep, so perhaps the list is spot on after all. My ponderings aside, everything in here is really exceptional.

9 Gateway Pieces to Contemporary Music for Pop Lovers | heather roche:

He’s helped me to create a list of nine comparisons between contemporary classical music and pop, intended for curious pop music listeners, in which each counterpart piece has some artistic commonality with the other. While this blog normally hosts entries intended for the initiated contemporary classical music listener (and, for the most part, the composer), this post has the adventurous pop music listener in mind, the suggestions aiming to be portals to previously unencountered music.

I’ve tried to pick a mix of work: young people who are active and changing the new music landscape, an older generation at the height of their power, two who would be with us working still had they not died tragically young, and plenty of brilliant women. And I also provided a “What’s next” for each suggestion: I’m mostly freestyling here in my associations, but I hope they’re of interest. There are a lot of different avenues that contemporary classical music has gone down, so if one sub-genre doesn’t appeal to you, all is not lost. You might notice a lack of minimalist composers here: minimalism (Reich, Glass, Nyman, etc.) is fairly omnipresent these days; I wanted to expose some of the other sub-genres available to curious listeners.

Adventurous indeed.

The Sonos Approach

As an advocate for both high quality speakers and home automation, the relationship between the Amazon Echo and the Sonos home stereo is exciting to me. Ever since the announcement of their future integration, I have wondered: how specifically will I be able to command my Sonos speakers? Will the Amazon Echo speaker itself be able to play music from my Sonos library? Will music accessible on my Sonos (Amazon Prime for example) be able to be triggered on the Sonos? Will I be able to trigger anything from my Sonos library from the Echo, even if the Echo doesn’t have that information stored within it?

These questions plague me. In the meantime, it is great to see that Sonos is thinking about deep integration and the long term. Check out this article about it:

http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/14/14596904/sonos-ceo-alexa-smart-home-outdoor-speakers-patrick-spence-interview

Komp, music handwriting app for iPad, is released

I forgot to post this when it happened. Komp, a new musical handwriting app for iOS, was released in late April. Click here to download.

The Scoring Notes blog has a great review of it (read here). I have not spent nearly enough time with the app to review it fairly, but it did leave a very gut first impression on me.

The pricing model is subscription based (five dollars a month, fifty dollars a year). As someone who has embraced a number of subscription priced apps (Dropbox, Evernote, Microsoft Office, etc.) this isn't a bad thing. Whether you like it or not, this is the direction the industry is going. Komp is thinking forward with this model.

Komp is way prettier than most score apps out there, and this matters! Beautiful interfaces and intuitive designs have been made standard on iOS, and it is great to see professional music software by third parties coding with this priority in mind. Unfortunately, I do not find all of Komp's user interface very intuitive. It isn't so bad once you figure it out. I do wish the score setup screen would adhere better to some of the iOS interface standards for file management and new document creation. And I wish the introduction video did a better job showing where the finger/pencil are clicking and tapping. I saw what was happening on the screen, but not always exactly what I was supposed to tap to get there.

Scoring Notes also does a great job explaining how Komp interprets Appel Pencil input. In short, it interprets as you write instead of after you have completed a measure. This leads to some freedoms as well as some frustrations, all of which you can read in their review. In the short time I have used Komp, I still feel like I am fighting with it rather than writing freely and letting the software do it's work. Even though it is in some respects better looking and more powerful than competitors like NotateMe and MusicJot, I am not sure it has a place in my workflow yet. There were still too many mistakes in the processing of my pencil strokes that I would just rather write with real pencil and paper at first, and then later inputting into a piece of software like Sibelius or Dorico.

In other words, I am not sure Komp is a real revolution in handwriting notation on a tablet yet. But it is only a 1.0, and time will tell if this is a viable input method for composers.

Great iOS 11 concept video

Check out this expertly executed concept video of features that Federico Viticci hopes will come to the iPad in iOS 11. 

I use my iPad for getting work done more and more everyday. There are still a lot of hurdles in the software for getting work done. I think Federico has done a great job illustrating how some of these problems could be solved in an elegant way that doesn’t confuse the intuitive nature of iOS. 

I will loose my mind if Apple announces a file management feature anything like the Finder demoed in this video. Apple’s developer conference kicks off with a keynote at 1 pm on June 5 where they are expected to announce next years iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS feature updates. Announcements of some hardware products, including a Siri powered speaker to rival the Amazon Echo, are also rumored to appear. 

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