Tag Archive for 'Music'

LA Opera

So, add someone else to the list of our people who are doing cool things with their lives! Letitia Ugwueke (formerly Johnson) is singing as part of the chorus for the LA Opera Company production of Porgy and Bess. Go Leti!

porgy and bess

Phreaky Phriday: In The Mood

There comes a time, in every musicians life, when the lead trumpet player in your big band can’t make the gig, and he sends in a sub. The sub is always, always, this guy.

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Take that, Maynard!

Cumulative Advantage

A great article in the NY Times about how market rush can influence the popularity of certain songs and artists. In other words, songs become popular because they are popular with a heavily influential group of first movers. Read the article. The experiment they ran is fascinating.

… when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.”

Read the rest of the article:

Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? by Duncan J. Watts

A note to my young songwriting friends

Do me a favor. Take that heart-felt emotional ballad you’ve just written, and place it in the hands of a trusted friend. Ask them to read the lyrics, and circle any metaphors they’ve heard before.

Then, cut them out. Do it now. Show no mercy. Think of a different way to say whatever it is you want to say. You’ll thank me 6 hours into the recording session.

Sincerely,

The guy

beth orton
photo by Neil Wykes

don’t worry

don’t worry, be happy!