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From Beyond the Stave - Cage on Future Radio.
A few miles up the road from Boydell’s Suffolk office is the home of the stimulating and often outspoken blog, On an Overgrown Path. The associated Future Radio broadcast this coming Sunday (February 10th, repeated on Monday) will feature the music of John Cage. Anyone coming away from this programme with an appetite for more should investigate Peter Dickinson’s recent book of interviews with and about the composer, CageTalk, described as “a valuable and enjoyable read” by BBC Music Magazine and an “ideal introduction to Cage” by the venerable Times Literary Supplement. Available, as they say, from all good booksellers, some of whom may be found here.
My photo shows John Cage to students of Oberlin College, March 1973 (photo credit: Narrye Caldwell) and is linked from this excellent resource. More on John Cage here.
Future Radio feed on right-hand side-bar. Audio fAny copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
'The global forest fire of revolution in 1968 needed no internet - if anything, it was the antithesis of the sedentary, logged-in, blogged-out world of today's deactivated youth. It was a time of direct communication, between countries and within them, so that throughout the Mexican summer mimeographs worked all night to produce 'wall newspapers' telling of prisoners, police brutality, and proposed further agitation. Slogans were spray-painted on buses, handbills thrown from tower blocks and leaflets placed inside brown bags alongside bread sold by bakeries' - Ed Vulliamy writes in today's Observer in one of a series of excellent articles about the year that rocked the world - 1968.
Related logged-in and blogged-out resources here include:
* Notes of a college revolutionary
* Why aren't we marching in the streets?
* They were demanding jazz and rock and roll
* Karlheinz Sockhausen - part of a dream
* The year is '72
* Oscar Peterson or Karlheinz Stockhausen?
* Music can help change the world
* Music acid and the collapse of Communism * I am a camera - St Tropez 1967
Header image is the London cast album of Hair, which opened, of course, in New York and London in 1968. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
The BBC's iPlayer may have finally been given the go-ahead by the BBC Trust, but it has yet to launch and in the interim commercial radio has stolen a march. Under the guidance of the RadioCentre's energetic chief executive, Andrew Harrison, the trade body has launched its own version - the RadioCentre Player. Although it is initially being positioned as an internal tool to get exposure for all of the UK's 300 or so commercial stations, it has the potential to go way beyond a bit of in-house marketing.
So what does the player offer? At its heart is an existing piece of software developed by a US company, Ressen Design, which adapted it for the RadioCentre. This is how commercial radio has got the player out so fast; in contrast the BBC's iPlayer is being developed in-house.
The RadioCentre Player features 12 preset stations, including the national services, Classic, Virgin and TalkSport; other big stations such as Heart and Capital, and a few smaller regionals from Channel 103 FM to Lincs FM. The selection of the preset list is not based on audience or any other consumer measure but on who sits around the RadioCentre board table, hence the bizarre mix.
Putting such political nonsense to one side, the player gives access to every single station in the UK, either in an alphabetical format or by group ownership basis. This means that you can listen live, in real time, for free, to any station in Britain. Whether you are a record plugger wanting to assess a music format (or, more importantly, find out whether a station really is playing your artist's song), or a media buyer checking out the target audience, this is a brilliant tool. It is quick - almost every station buffers and streams live in less than 10 seconds - and there are fewer clicks than going on to the BBC website to "listen again".
But it goes further than that. The player also gives access to thousands of internet-only and licensed radio stations from around the world: 10,227 stations, in fact, including 3,794 from the US.
Now that the RadioCentre Player is launched, the genie is out of the bottle, and it will inevitably become a consumer tool because listeners will want it.
That report comes from the Media Guardian, and follow this link to use the RadioCentre Player in the UK, for other readers download the version from the US site. Software applications like RadioCentre Player are disruptive technology, and they are going to revolutionise radio in the same way that blogs have revolutionised journalism.
To see the real power of the RadioCentre Player click on the Search button above the presets window, then click on the + symbol on the tree that appears to expand a branch, Worldwide Radio > Stations by Format/Genre/Style > Classical gives a choice of 170 stations. If the station doesn't stream through the player (some connections seem to be flaky) connect to the stream direct from the station website which appears in the centre window in the player.
There are now more than ten-thousand radio stations available on your PC, or stream them to your stereo using Squeezebox. You can search by genre, and any station anywhere in the world is now just a couple of mouse clicks away.
This is a fantastic opportunities for classical and contemporary music to reach new audiences, and this blog will be part of the revolution. The photo below shows me working in the studio yesterday on the radio version of On An Overgrown Path. Watch this blog, or should that be radio station?
Now read more about the future of radio
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
