Giorgio Sancristoforo makes some wonderful noise toys. The latest is Full Blotter – very large grains psychedelic machine which takes your jolly little ditty and mangles it in to something other worldly…
I always appreciate a DMORAN button 🤪
Category: Music
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Jettisoning Jetpack
So farewell Jetpack. I subscribed from the early days when you offered some useful tools at a reasonable price. Over the years the price increased and the tools became less useful. So some of this blog will probably stop working. On departing you warn that I will no longer be able to use WordAds – whatever they are 🤷♂️.
I am sure it will be a great loss to both of us. Who does not enjoy websites littered with junk advertising? I know I do. But it is indicative of how the mercantile has subsumed the personal on the web these days. Having no need for an audience and no desire to build one I shall continue, regardless, with what interests/amuses/educates me.
Similarly I have closed my Bandcamp account. They seem to have become the type of people I try to avoid. I should also cancel my Apple Music subscription since they deemed Taylor Swift to be their artist of the year and their general uselessness…. but I have yet to find anything better and do not want to return to collecting records. It seems to be a service for people who neither like nor have any interest in music. In the days of yore if I ventured in to a record shop and was confronted by a Classical department filled with the non-classical titles available in Apple’s Classical app I would walk out as they clearly had no idea what they are doing. But on the other hand it does pass the Memphis Minnie test – if the record shop had something by Memphis Minnie that was easily findable it may be worth my time perusing their racks.
Similar artists to Edward Elgar???
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More Classical Music app weirdness
Having endured Apple Music since it started, begrudgingly paying an annual subscription mostly because it is no worse than any of the other streaming services, I was hopeful that the Apple Music Classical app might be an improvement. Alas what we have so far has left me somewhere between annoyed and angry.
What is classical music? According to Apple..
Does Apple Music Classical feature other types of music?
https://learn.applemusic.apple/apple-music-classical
No. Apple Music Classical is completely focused on classical music.But as Kirk McElhearn points out in his extensive and more positive review there are endless examples of music that one would not normally class as classical. The common denominator seems to be that the composer has had a piece of their music performed by an orchestra or ensemble thus appearing to be leaning towards some form of classical style of music. One of McElhearn’s examples is Robert Fripp “whose music is about as far from classical as could be”
The inclusion of Fripp seems to hang on an interpretation of a section of Fracture from Starless And Bible Black by the guitarist Alberto Mesirca and a rendition by the Japanese Trouvère Quartet of 21st Century Schizoid Man.
From there we fall down the bizarre rabbit hole of Apple’s Music search algorithm which is so fuzzy it is often nigh impossible to determine why something has been included in the results. Fripp has twenty four albums listed in the Classical app. These range from his own albums to collaborations with Brian Eno to David Bowie’s greatest hits via Wagner and Stravinsky. The Wagner includes Robert Heger and, separately, The Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus, The Stravinsky, recorded in 1962 while teenage Fripp was concentrating on school examinations, similarly, I can only assume, is included because it was conducted by Robert Craft and features Paul Tripp 🤷♂️
So Classical = not Classical. Perhaps Serious would be a better descriptor – music created to be listened to rather than a product to be marketed and sold to specific demographic. As Duke Ellington once observed:
There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind … the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it’s successful; if it doesn’t it has failed.
Duke Ellington: Where Is Jazz Going? Music Journal; New York Vol. 20, Iss. 3, (Mar 1, 1962)There are two kinds of Music app – the good Music app and the other kind….
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.
Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing, Wired Feb 1, 1996
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Apple’s Classical Music App 🤬
I think I actually blushed on opening Apple’s Classical Music app. It is an iPhone app but the App Store assured me it works on my iPad. I have lots of iPhone apps on my iPad. They all work fine.
Who would not think it a good idea to have the text mingling with the Play and Browse buttons?
And is Ludwig van Beethoven really On This Album?
And did Frank Zappa write Bolero?
And is the third section not iii or III rather than Iii? At least they managed to get Elaine Radigue right…
….oh cancel that! Why is there no simple way to report such errors like there is on Apple Maps?
Let’s hope version 2 is not too far away and it makes some improvements… but I am not holding my breath.