paul bailey

"ImprovFriday is an ongoing web-based music-sharing event, started this past spring by J.C.Combs. For about 48 hours beginning Friday mornings, musicians of any and all stripes gather on the web and share newly created work. The idea is to make improvisations, but the idea of improvisation is interpreted much more loosely than is used by more traditional jazz and pop styles (though it can perfectly accomodate these, too). The pieces here are all mash-ups I made during the sessions, using that week's contributions from the other IF players around the world. Each musician's contribution for that week was a self-contained track, played completely separately from all the others. I did the arranging (the "ikebana", I like to call it), but none of this wonderful sound would exist without the creativity and generosity of these musicians." - paul bailey

"I fantasize that someday In C will be programmed on regular orchestra concerts. Yes, getting this piece into the standard repertory is a long ways off. If it happened, In C would change from a "minimalist classic" into an actual piece of classical music. That would provide strong evidence that classical music has some life left in it." A chamber orchestra would be just the right size. Before the intermission the program could be, maybe, a Rossini overture and a Mozart concerto. And the second half would be a 35-minute performance of In C employing all the performers from the first half. Great concert! Of course, during In C the conductor should sit in the ensemble and play an instrument, provided he or she is capable. Otherwise tell the conductor to sit in the audience. - paul bailey

great to see addi digged on youtube! - paul bailey

"Recently in our humble corner of Los Angeles, a brewery opened. Which is great news to anyone, (especially myself) who enjoys what Benjamin Franklin said was, “proof that God loves us.” Microbrewing is something I have supported for a long, long, and expensive time. Having a new microbrewery nearby is a wonderful thing. The only problem is the name. And what is in a name? To quote Shakespeare, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Maybe so, but out of the millions of names to engrave on your mast, the brewers of this new brewery have chosen to name their venture after a location here in Northeast Los Angeles. It’s good to represent, right? The name of this new establishment is Eagle Rock Brewery. Great, Eagle Rock is a fine place; home to many of my favorite festivals, restaurants, stores, and newspapers. The only problem is the brewery is not located in Eagle Rock 90041, but in Glassell Park 90065." - paul bailey

"I’m still reading the responses to my "Leukemia" missive. I appreciate the good will. But I’m reading slowly not only because the missives are all personal, directed specifically to me, but because I’m learning so much. I heard from Steven Page, formerly of the Barenaked Ladies. Did I know that Kevin Hearn from BNL had leukemia? Steven copied him on the e-mail. Turns out Kevin had CML too. Before Gleevec. He had a bone marrow transplant, and it worked.But it’s not. [snip] Because some guy who wasn’t in it for the money, who was willing to sacrifice everything for his passion, put together the pieces to come up with a breakthrough drug that allows me to live." - paul bailey

"Marshall McLuhan appeared on the Dick Cavett Show in December of 1970 along with Truman Capote and Chicago Bears running back, Gayle Sayers. Both Capote and Sayers participated in the discussion with McLuhan. This recording was made on reel-to-reel audio tape in 1970 and directly transferred to computer in 2005. Unfortunately, the exact date of the show was not noted, except that the show did take place before Christmas. All commercials and breaks were removed from McLuhan's appearance." - paul bailey

"Tweet: A view of our annotated world: Hyperlocal is what’s around me and how I search that There are eight million stories in the naked city and soon every one of them will be available on your phone through visual, aural, and geographic search and augmented reality in our newly annotated world. Every address, every building, every business has a story to tell. Visualize your world that way: Look at a restaurant and think about all the data that already swirls around it — its menu, its reviews and ratings and tags (descriptive words), its recipes, its ingredients, its suppliers (and how far away they are, if you care about that sort of thing), its reservation openings, who has been there (according to social applications), who do we know who has been there, its health-department reports, its credit-card data (in aggregate, of course), pictures of its interior, pictures of its food, its wine list, the history of the location, its decibel rating, its news… " - paul bailey

"In January 1985, the phone rang. The caller announced that he was Orson Welles and that he wanted to have lunch with me. Thus began one of the most extraordinary and bittersweet adventures of my life." Sometimes the journeys we take through this life begin and end in the most unexpected ways. My encounter with Welles in the last days of his life centered on a common interest: Sony's new one-piece camcorder, the Betacam. It had just come to market and Welles, always the genius filmmaker, had big ideas for what he could do with one. With Welles there were no limits. "You can't do that" wasn't in his vocabulary. This was a short, but very passionate story - paul bailey

"Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past" - paul bailey

"The Ondes Martenot is a very expressive electronic instrument - Maurice Martenot, who invented it, was a cellist, and wanted an electronic instrument that could be played with the same degree of expression as a string instrument. Oraison is a piece I've always loved - I first heard it years ago as a student - and when I got the Buchla/Continuum system, I realized that the Continuum would let me play the piece myself, as it's a superbly expressive controller, with the advantage that it's polyphonic, unlike the original Ondes. So I spent some time transcribing the piece from the original score, then spent a lot more time practicing it. The Buchla let me program a sound that was similar to the Ondes, but with even more expression in the timbre control, and that's what I used for my version. So, my own realization is a kind of analog-digital homage to the original - analog in the sound-producing domain, but digital in the control domain." - paul bailey

"Let's get one thing out there first: Anybody can edit Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. In that sense, anyone can be a Wikipedia editor. However, to be trusted within the Wikipedia community requires a bit more effort. This article will show you how easy it is to get started and set you on the right path to being a Wikipedia editor. You're looking at a Mediawiki wiki, and it works in the same way Wikipedia does. If you're reading this, you're probably new to wiki editing. That shouldn't stop you from practicing. If you've got some beginner tips to share, log in and edit this wiki page." - paul bailey

"In a first, ESA’s Mars Express orbiter imaged the martian moons Phobos and Deimos together on 5 November 2009. Apart from their ‘wow’ factor, these unique images will help the HRSC team validate and refine existing orbit models of the two moons. The images were acquired with the Super Resolution Channel (SRC) of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The camera took 130 images of the moons on 5 November at 9:14 CET in a span of 1.5 minutes at intervals of 1s, speeding up to 0.5-s intervals toward the end. The image resolution is 110 m/pixel for Phobos and 240 m/pixel for Deimos — Deimos was more than twice as far from the camera." - paul bailey

"Hot on the heels of James MacMillan's red-hot piece in these pages calling Emperor's New Clothes on Pierre Boulez, plus Dilettante Music's digital composer-in-residence contest, and Norman Lebrecht's poll of the living composers creating the most durable work (John Adams is no.1, then Part, then Reich), here's more contemporary food for thought. Greg Sandow of Artsjournal's blog about the future of classical music has run a post about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's two new composers-in-residence. They are Mason Bates and Anna Clyne. Not likely to be familiar names if your view of new music is simply what the BBC Symphony Orchestra..." - paul bailey