Site Seeing - Music Website News

New Millennium Records

Composer Hayden Wayne has found a way of synthesising popular music styles with classical music, and his music is popular in the Czech Republic. He has written symphonic, opera and chamber music. CDs of Wayne's very listenable music are available for ordering on-line from www.newmillenniumrecords.com .

Indian Musical Instruments

Recently launched is www.surela.com, the (well-designed, practical and good to look at) website of Surela Musical Instrument Distributors, the Indian Musical Instruments Store based in the USA. Many unusual instruments for sale (e.g. a bean or snake flute with three pipes and made of pumpkin).

Carolina Culture Connection

The websites of Charles K. Moss are definitely worth a visit. Carolina Culture Connection is a page of links to much of the best music on the web, also including a huge page where website owners can add their own links. Charles also hosts the Art Music Webring - a collection of the finest music websites.

Codecs Compared

John Hayward-Warburton has written a knowledgeable and useful article comparing all audio compression codecs - Real Audio, MP3 and Microsoft Audio 4.0 are three popular examples. Samples are available for comparison at www.billabong-media.com/compression .

NMC and Elgar/Payne

NMC Recordings have built a diverse catalogue of recordings of music by British composers (from Britten to the present day), including Howard Skempton, David Sawer, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Finnissy. Their CD of Birtwistle's opera The Mask of Orpheus is particularly good, and there are many other fine discs. Their website is at www.nmcrec.co.uk . NMC's best-selling release is the BBCSO/Davis recording of the Elgar/Payne Symphony no.3. Whilst on the subject of Elgar 3, there's an interesting musical tour (in Real Audio) of this symphony on the Elgar Society's website .

Canadian Musical Heritage Society

Based at Carleton University in Ottawa, the Canadian Musical Heritage Society is completing its 25-volume (first-ever) anthology of pre-1950 Canadian music. Further information at www.cmhs.carleton.ca .

Keyboard wizards

Pianist and music historian Artis Wodehouse's new folio of transcriptions of Jelly Roll Morton's Piano Rolls is published by Hal Leonard (HL 00672433). The work was a spin-off of his realisations of Morton's piano rolls on Nonesuch CD 79363. Further information at www.keyboardwizards.com .

Avoid musicians' injuries

Paul Marxhausen's long and very informative article Musicians and Injuries at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's website will help you to avoid many of the repetitive strain injuries to which musicians are susceptible. Lists books, tapes and has links to other articles on line.

Paris Opera - international bookings

If you visit France and want to reserve tickets in advance from abroad at either of Paris Opera's two houses, Garner or Bastille, information is available from Paris Opera's web site at http://www.opera-de-paris.fr/fram-som.html . (Paris Opera don't provide on-line ordering.) Alain Letort from Brazil has investigated, and produced the following summary:

'... download their most recent reservation form (also from the OdP web site), write in your date and seat preferences, include a charge card number, and mail it so that it will reach the Paris Opera on the day that reservations start for the performance you are interested in. [...] any post office anywhere in the world should be able to sell you an international reply coupon or 'coupon-reponse international' issued by the Universal Postal Union. These are redeemable anywhere in the world for the return postage to the country where the IRC was sold. [...] Or, find a French speaker who can place a phone call for you and have your credit card number handy.'

If you phone, Alain suggests that you should shouldn't count on speaking English.

Flying inkpots

'Our quest is to introduce, review, appraise and share!' is the message at the website of The Flying Inkpot - an ever-so-slightly humorous page of classical music reviews which appears to be updated every two weeks.

Copyright © Keith Bramich, June 8th 1999

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