Because it’s relatively difficult to learn, modern-day design experts have criticized staff notation as a badly-designed system. In a controversial talk by Dan Formosa, he said of staff notation, "My…
MP3s have made music more compact and portable than ever. Most consumers, especially young people, traded their CDs and MP3 players for streaming music. But MP3 downloads are still the…
The purpose of mixing recorded music in stereo is to give you a realistic sense of how the instruments are placed with regard to left and right. Stereos use two…
One reason that it’s important for beginners to learn to interact with music in real time is that it prepares them to use session training to practice parts to real…
There will never be another era in musical history which compares with the second half of the 20th century. Each decade from the 1940s through the 1980s produced its own…
For non-classical musicians, the best predictor of whether a student is going to succeed at learning an instrument is whether or not they listen to music played on the instrument…
Back in the 1970s, there was a skit on the National Lampoon Radio Hour entitled “Mr Rogers Interviews a Bass Player.” It’s a parody of the long-running PBS children’s show,…
Classical music today remains as vital and dynamic as classical Latin. Non plaudite, modo pecuniam jacite!** Albinoni's "Adagio in G Minor" was written in 1708, but only discovered after WWII.…
The first, most superficial difference between classical and modern music is that classical music is old, and modern music is new. A more important difference is that classical music limits…
In an earlier post about the album It's A Beautiful Day, I quoted David LaFlamme's remarks about "the world of Classical music" at that time. His story illustrates the point…