Week 6 Social aspects of music

Chapter 7 in Musicopilia

The first part of this chapter, Sacks discusses two different people, one who has the heart and desire to play the piano but just doesn’t have the ability and another who has all the ability but just doesn’t have the heart. It reminds me so much of the ending of Center Stage. One of the main characters, Maureen played by Susan May Pratt, who says to her mother when Maureen doesn’t appear in the final performance because she has an eating disorder: “You didn’t have the feet [meaning that her mother didn’t have good feet for ballet], I don’t have the heart”. There are many people who have the ability but not the heart and many people who have the heart but not the ability.

He mentions Joshua Bell!!! (102). See this video:

I disagreed somewhat absolute pitch can be achieved by musical training at an early age (pg 103). I feel that is a small part of it but more importantly it has to do with genetics.

Chapter 11 in Musicopilia

This chapter looks at loss of hearing and how the brain changes to compensate. It was a very short chapter.

Chapter 4 and 5 in music library manual

You know, growing up with all the music in my life, I never realized there was an order to music scores, which is part of this chapter on how to process music library collections.  

Chapter five is interesting because it talks about how different parts are processed. They talk about making sure there are no awkward page turns…. I have never known any library to deal with this, even the university music library. They live the music as and yes, sometimes there are awkward page turns, most musicals memorize those parts so that they can turn the page differently. This chapter also looks at how parts are divided and doubled.

Website reviews

Sociology of Rock Music (Deena Weinstein, DePaul University)
http://condor.depaul.edu/~dweinste/rock/
I love that that they have a Rock vs. Pop section. Sometimes it can be both but many times they are separate! I love their section on Controversial albums. Seems strange today for some of them (http://www.retrocrush.com/archive/controversy/)

Music-Map
http://www.music-map.com/
Ohh this site is cool! Though it doesn’t know some artists (the first search I put in was Harley Jay) but when I put in Josh Gran, it gives you artists of similar genres!

Royalty Calculator
http://www.mosesavalon.com/calculate.shtml
interesting calculator… Since I don’t make records I don’t really need it…