Monday, June 23, 2014

Video: 1980s Dot-Matrix Printer Plays Bach

Draft or letter quality? This old dot-matrix printer churns out more than carefully aligned pages of text. It plays Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a piece originally written for the (slightly grander) pipe organ.  Listen here!

An A-Z of musical terms

Even if you’ve not picked up an instrument since you were eight and tootled away on a recorder, or stood at the back of a school hall holding a tambourine, you probably know the odd piece of musical terminology – forte, perhaps, or andante might ring a bell. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty more where those came from – and we’ve looked into The Oxford Dictionary of Music and the Oxford Dictionary of Musical Terms to create an A-Z of directions and expression markings in French (F), German (G), and Italian (I).  more

Monday, June 9, 2014

Welcome to the Milton J. Hinton Institute for Studio Bass!

The inaugural Milt Hinton Institute for Studio Bass will feature a daylong festival on Thursday, June 12, called "Celebrating Milt Hinton.”

Part of a multifaceted new relationship between Oberlin and the estate of the late bassist, the celebration culminates with an evening concert and reception in Oberlin Conservatory's Warner Concert Hall.  More

Popular Singers with the Widest Singing Range

Everyone knows that singers like Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera have tremendous vocal range, but who would have thought that Guns N' Roses' Axl Rose could beat them all.

Concerthotels.com, "one of the most popular travel services for value conscious leisure travelers", has compiled a list of the singers with the greatest range. They took the top 100 singers as identified by Rolling Stone and added in a few modern artists, including the nominees for the Billboard Music Awards, and used data from the site The Range Place, which compiles lists of the highest and lowest notes sung by artists on their studio recordings, to come up with their rankings. More