Taking time off

Following two bad bouts of flu I'm taking a couple of weeks off. If urgent, please call my cellphone.

DMcF Band Christmas Special & more...

The Duncan McFarlane Band plays its annual Christmas 'special' for Otley Folk Club

On FRIDAY 11^th December, in Korks on Bondgate, Otley, starting at 8.45pm
The DMcF Acoustic Band will open with a 45min 'support' set, followed by the

DMcF Electric Band, which will play two hours plus of their fine folk-rock!
This same evening sees Otley having its annual Victorian Street Fair with much to see and partake of earlier in the evening,

winding down by 8.30pm just in time for a stroll along to see us in the big music room at the back of Korks Bar & Restaurant on Bondgate.

 

Still in November, though…

 

The DMcF Acoustic Band will be at Bedworth Folk Festival

from Fri-Sun 27-29^th Nov making several appearances over the weekend.

Have a great festive season! - Cheers - The McF crew

World's first album of Twitter music available now

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Simon Levey <s.levey@qmul.ac.uk>
Date: 2009/11/19
Subject: World's first album of Twitter music available now
To: karldallas@f2s.com

PRESS RELEASE - For immediate release

World's first album of Twitter music available now

For the first time, you can now download an album of digital music written exclusively for Twitter.

Entitled sc140, this unique collection has been curated by Dan Stowell, a composer and computer scientist at Queen Mary, University of London.

It may be nearly Christmas, but Stowell explained that this isn't the kind of album that would be appreciated by your average relative: "My granny might raise her eyebrows if I gave her sc140 for Christmas, but if yours is the Aphex Twin type, then she'd definitely love it."

Messages on micro-blogging site Twitter are limited to 140 characters - barely enough room for an articulate sentence. However, a new breed of cutting-edge composers are coming up with programming tricks to squeeze as much as five minutes of music into those 140 characters.

"It all started a few months ago," said Stowell, who is studying for his PhD in Queen Mary's Centre for Digital Music (C4DM). "I was writing in a programming language - called SuperCollider - that tells a computer what sounds to make and posted a tweet containing the instructions to create a sound like waves crashing on the shore. The next thing I knew people were tweeting back with sounds and music of their own."

He went on: "Some of the tweets made such great music that I couldn't just let them vanish into the ether. So I brought all the best ones together in an online album, called sc140, which anyone can download for free."

Musicians can already collaborate online by sending audio recordings to each other, but this new project may lead to the traditionally solitary process of composition becoming the latest craze of social activity. The speed of social network messaging could take musical collaborations to a new level, like a 'hive mind' of composing inspiration.

"For computer scientists and composers alike, it's an interesting challenge," said Stowell. "Musicians often enjoy the challenge of working within limitations, and in our research group we investigate new ways of making music and communicating artistically."

Dan Stowell and his colleagues in the C4DM work to apply computer science and audio signal processing to help analyse music and create new ways to enjoy music. Since its founding members joined Queen Mary in 2001, the Centre has grown to become arguably the UK's leading Digital Music research group.

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Here's what Ode To Joy would look like if Beethoven had used twitter:

{b="GGHJJHGECCEG".ascii.stutter;f=Duty.kr(0.15,0,Dseq([b,71!3,69!5,b,69!3,67!5,0].flat.midicps))*[1,2];LFCub.ar(f)/9}.play

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- ENDS -


The album sc140 is freely available at http://supercollider.sf.net/sc140



For more information, contact:
Simon Levey
Communications Officer | Queen Mary, University of London
t: +44 (0) 20 7882 5404
e: s.levey@qmul.ac.uk
tw: twitter.com/QMUL
w: www.qmul.ac.uk


Notes to Editors

Centre for Digitial Music (C4DM)

For more information about Queen Mary's Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), visit http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic

More about Dan Stowell's research can be found at: http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/people/dans.htm and his personal and artistic interests at: http://www.mcld.co.uk/


Queen Mary, University of London

Queen Mary, University of London is one of the UK's leading research-focused higher education institutions with some 15,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Amongst the largest of the colleges of the University of London, Queen Mary's 3,000 staff deliver world class degree programmes and research across 21 academic departments and institutes, within three sectors: Science and Engineering; Humanities, Social Sciences and Laws; and the School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Ranked 11th in the UK according to the Guardian analysis of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, Queen Mary has been described as 'the biggest star among the research-intensive institutions' by the Times Higher Education and also won the 'Most Improved Student Experience' award for 2009, reflecting the superb academic and social experience offered to all students at the College. The College has a strong international reputation, with around 20 per cent of students coming from over 100 countries.

Queen Mary has an annual turnover of £220 million, research income worth £61 million, and generates employment and output worth £600 million to the UK economy each year.

As a member of the 1994 Group of research-focused universities, Queen Mary has made a strategic commitment to the highest quality of research, but also to the best possible educational, cultural and social experience for its students.

The College is unique amongst London's universities in being able to offer a completely integrated residential campus, with a 2,000-bed award-winning Student Village on its Mile End campus.

Website: www.qmul.ac.uk


NOISE

Stowell is also part of a scheme called NOISE (New Outlooks In Science & Engineering), which is a UK-wide campaign funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). By providing media and public engagement training, the initiative aims to provide early-career researchers with the tools to communicate their work effectively and to engage people with science and engineering. www.epsrc.ac.uk

Queen Mary University London, Mile End Road, London, London E1 4NS United Kingdom

Gaza heart benefit, Nov 29

I am organising a benefit at the Bradford Playhouse (290 seats) on Nov 29 to raise funds for Palestine International Medical Aid to help buy a cardiac bypass machine for Gaza with the necessary pumps, tubing and oxygenators worth 160,000 Euros. An advanced payment of 64000 Euros has already been raised and paid. It is estimated that 300 cases of cardiothoracic surgery per year are needed in Gaza. Sending these patients abroad is not a viable option due to crossing closure, expenses, safety of transfer and family inconvenience and hardship. I wonder if you or anyone you are in contact with might be able and willing to perform at this benefit. If not 1. Could you donate autographed CDs, songbooks, DVDs etc to be auctioned at the event? 2. Do you know any other artists who might be willing to take part?
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Go well.
Karl Dallas
See the video of me singing my version of Willie Nelson's Peaceful Solution: http://willienelsonpri.com/peace/3624/a-peaceful-solution-karl-dallas.html

Programme and tickets for Raise Your Banners, Nov 6-8, Bradford

For more details see www.raiseyourbanners.org

 A fantastic line up. Buy before the end of October for a bargain price

"Weekend Saver"

Entry to all events at St Peter's House, Bradford Cathedral

and Bradford Resource Centre

£40 if purchased before 31^st October

£45.00 from 1^st November / on the door

 

Single Concert Tickets all in Blue Hall St Peter's House

Friday night, Nov 6 Chumbawamba, Bleeding Hearts, Tracey Curtis, Gary Kaye

£15.00 from 1^st November / on the door

£12.50 if purchased before 31^st October

 

Saturday afternoon, Nov 7

Turning Silence into Song:  Leon Rosselson Birthday Concert Leon Rosselson, Roy Bailey, Frankie Armstrong, Sandra Kerr, Martin Carthy, Janet Russell

£12.50 from 1^st November / on the door

£10.00 if purchased before 31^st October

 

Saturday night, Nov 7 Alun Parry, The General Will's repertoire of political song and satire

£12.50 from 1^st November / on the door

£10.00 if purchased before 31^st October

 

Sunday afternoon, Nov 8

Claire Mooney, Hall Brothers, Sex Patels, Imani Hekima

£10.00 from 1^st November / on the door

£8.00 if purchased before 31^st October

 

 

Saturday afternoon, Nov 7 (1 pm) and evening (7.30 pm) in Bradford Cathedral

Concerts by Political and Community Choirs and Singing Groups

£5 each

Please send cheques made payable to "Raise Your Banners" with your details to:

 Sam Jackson, Raise Your Banners

c/o Bradford Resource Centre 17-21 Chapel Street Bradford BD1 5DT

 

 

 

 

 

Test message

This is a test of emailing a posting.

I have now added “comments” links to all my blogs. This means that when you read something, you can add a comment, without having to subscribe.

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Karl Dallas

REVISITED: Tony Palmer's 9-hour Wagner epic

Wagner (Tony Palmer, 1983)
Bradford’s wonderful Museum of Photography, Film and TV commemorated the twentieth anniversary of Tony Palmer’s Wagner film with an all-day showing of this innovative nine-hour biography of a composer who is still controversial and hated as much as he is loved. Wagner’s music was effectively banned in Israel until the year 2000 because of the composer’s anti-Semitic views, and it’s undoubtedly true that, in a wider sense, his ideas provided the intellectual justification for the horrors of the Holocaust.

Indeed, Wagner’s grandson Wolfgang, whose blessing made the project possible, was Hitler’s godchild.

Palmer’s epic makes no effort to disguise this unattractive aspect of his subject, and in fact his constant harping on about the way Jews were responsible for his money worries – when, in fact, many Jews helped bail him out of his self-induced penury – did get a bit wearing after over 800 minutes of it.

Though Burton was not Palmer’s first choice for the title role – he originally wanted Albert Finney for it – his larger-than-life public persona filled out the performance so that the audience brought to his picture of the tortured self-destructive artist something that another might not have been able to bring. The use of an actor in the last few years of his life – Burton died a year after its release – suited admirably the end of Wagner’s life, his ravaged face entirely appropriate to the events portrayed on screen, but added some strange discrepancies to Wagner’s earlier life as a young revolutionary in 1848 Dresden.

In fact, though the movie’s box-office must have been improved by the star-studded cast – not only Burton, but a rare occasion to see John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier on screen together, plus lesser-known stars like the Berliner Ensemble’s Ekkehardt Schall as Franz Liszt – this was very much of an ensemble piece. Burton’s all-on-one-note ranting did tend to grate after a while, and the three theatrical knights didn’t really earn their crust.

Richardson was typically wooden and Olivier did that thing with his eyes and eyebrows he made such a feature of in John Mortimer’s Voyage Around My Father, which didn’t seem to have much to do with his role as Bavaria’s chief of police, and only Gielgud seemed to get inside the skin of his character.

A stand-out performance was Lásló Gálffi as King Ludwig II, probably Wagner’s most consistent financial supporter, and of course Vanessa Redgrave, as Cosima, Wagner’s last wife. In fact, much of the pleasure of this film was in watching the individual performances of the superb cast, such as Ronald Pickup’s very believable Nietzsche, and the exquisite Marthe Keller as Mathile Wesendonck, one of Wagner’s early loves. To watch the passage of thoughts across their faces as, seemingly, nothing much was happening, was a salutary lesson in non-Method acting.

But what really made the whole thing effective was the epic scale of the piece, aided, of course, by the superb cinematography of Vittoro Storaro. Much of the action was actually filmed in the original settings, though parts of old Budapest stood in for Nineteenth Century Dresden, and the Hungarian army were marshalled for the battle scenes.

I missed the satirical possibilities of some of Wagner’s more ludicrous posturings, which one of Palmer’s early mentors, Ken Russell (Palmer was producer on Russell’s Isadora at the beginning of his movie career) would undoubtedly have made too much of.

Of course, ardent Wagnerites will be asking: what about the music? It is absolutely wonderful. Palmer tells a delightful story about how Sir Georg Solti was persuaded to conduct for a much-reduced fee on condition that his daughter appeared as one of the Wagner children, thus beginning a successful career in film for her – she is now a successful director in her own right.

Since Solti is arguably the world’s greatest Wagner conductor, the music is superb. Some purists may object to the way that Palmer has used Wagner’s leitmotif technique to associate different musical themes with different emotional moods, so it appears that the inspiration for Tristan, say, lies in Wagner’s love life, while this isn’t necessarily how artists use their personal experience in their work.

It might also be complained that this usage reduces Wagner’s monumental compositions to the status of mere incidental music, though this is unfortunately a feature of much modern film, Kubrik plundering Ligeti for 2001, for instance. At least, using Wagner’s music in a film about Wagner keeps it in context.

Filmically, it is interesting that Palmer also uses the leitmotif technique in his visuals: the Nibelungen beating out weapons on their anvils at the very beginning recurs throughout, and especially at the end, when Wagner’s words about the German nation being purified by blood and fire remind us chillingly of how exactly that prophecy was fulfilled in the Holocaust.

The movie was screened in a video version, which lost some of the definition of film, but I was surprised to find that it is apparently not available in either VHS or DVD format, though the extended length would certainly lend itself to the latter format.-Karl Dallas
(Originally published in the Morning Star newspaper.)