by Fred (follow us on Facebook) From Tyler Cowen: In 1984, my marriage to Cindy was in serious trouble. I had started once a week therapy with a McLean Hospital based psychiatrist named Lenore Boling, and I used the sessions really just to give voice to my unhappiness with what my relationship with Cindy had [...]
Lies, damn lies, and statistics
by Fred From Tyler Cowen: The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales of 200 or 300 units are enough to land an album in the top 10. [Hilary] Hahn’s No. 1 recording, after the sales spike resulting from her appearance [...]
“Ou Marye” by Wyclef Jean
by Fred That track tops Tyler Cowen’s “Introduction to Haitian Music.” Read the rest, and follow the links, here.
Imperial March
In a recent Marginal Revolution post, Tyler Cowen posed an intriguing hypothetical: what if David Lynch had directed the film Return of the Jedi? Not a purely academic question: we learn that there was at least brief talk on the subject. Coincidentally enough, a few years before the second set of three films showed up, [...]
Great bloggers make great music bloggers
Over at Marginal Revolution, a reader (who identifies himself as Adam Smith, no less) poses an interesting music question: Why are the typical lengths of albums across different music genres so different? In particular, I was thinking most of my rap albums are at least over the hour mark and many run all the way [...]
Great bloggers make great music bloggers
From Marginal Revolution: Monkeys don’t care much for human music, but apparently they will groove to their own beat. Previous experiments have shown that tamarin monkeys prefer silence to Mozart, and they don’t respond emotionally to human music the way people do. But when a psychologist and a musician collaborated to compose music based on [...]
Cultural momentum
I’m a firm believer in cultural momentum, which, conveniently enough, is my two-word answer to Tyler Cowen’s question: “Why don’t they boo more at the opera?” From the original Freakonomics post: Terry Teachout, meditating on a rare outburst of booing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, wonders if classical music and theater are being [...]
From the vault: “Cowen: What’s the opening chord in Hard Day’s Night?”
I’ll be taking some time off over the next few days. I’ll rehash an old post a day, just to keep the lights on. From March 11: Find the answer here. The Beatles producer [George Martin] added a piano chord that included an F note, impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. [...]
Cowen: What’s the opening chord in “Hard Day’s Night?”
Find the answer here. The Beatles producer [George Martin] added a piano chord that included an F note, impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. The resulting chord was completely different than anything found in songbooks and scores for the song. Read the rest at the linked article, follow the clicks, and [...]
