The long-awaited album by offbeat violinist Anna Karkowska is ready to ship. The website‘s running, there’s a new video clip and record critics everywhere are undergoing advanced neurological tests before addressing their reviews.

So confident is the artist that you’re going to love her work, she has posted this on the website:
We do NOT accept any returns or exchanges so please make sure to listen to our music samples available on line first before ordering. In case of a lost or damaged package please contact your carrier directly.

 
 anna karkowska
                                               photo: www.annakarkowska.com
 

My little dickie-bird in Tenerife tells me that the government is trying to scale down the music conservatory in order to spend more money on Anna Netrebko and friends at the high-profile music festival.

Here’s a local press report in Spanish. And here’s another. It would be pretty awful if this sort of thing were allowed to go through. We’d all have to go looking for another island paradise.

Tenerife is supposed to be Europe’s Capital of Culture in 2016. Might have to rethink that, too.

Max Vernon Matthews, one of the first musicians to extract coherent sounds from a computer, has died in San Francisco, aged 84. Matthews was important less for original compositions as for the path that he lit for others to work with the infernal machine. He was a significant influence and facilitator for Pierre Boulez in the early years of IRCAM.

Here is his pitch for posterity:
Computer performance of music was born in 1957 when an IBM 704 in NYC played a 17 second composition on the Music I program which I wrote. The timbres and notes were not inspiring, but the technical breakthrough is still reverberating. Music I led me to Music II through V. A host of others wrote Music 10, Music 360, Music 15, Csound, Cmix, and SuperCollider. Many exciting pieces are now performed digitally.

“The IBM 704 and its siblings were strictly studio machines–they were far too slow to synthesize music in real-time. Chowning’s FM algorithms and the advent of fast, inexpensive, digital chips made real-time possible, and equally important, made it affordable.


Photo: http://www.csounds.com/mathews/
Here’s a further comment from Holland Festival director, Lieven Bertels
 

I have fond memories of writing countless (and often nightly) hours in Csound at Durham university’s palace green music studio, then send off the lines of code to the computer department to only hear back the resulting fragment of electronic music the next morning. Frustrating at times, because if you disliked what you heard, you could only rewrite the code (more countless hours) and rerun the program. Csound was a direct development of Max’s work. His name lives on in IRCAM’s most influential piece of software, still going strong after 25 years and in use in almost every single concert using real-time control of sound (or often these days, video), aywhere in the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software)

It is being authoritatively reported in Hong Kong that the search for a leader of the turbulent West Kowloon cultural district has narrowed down to one. 

The authorities are talking to Michael Lynch, former head of the Sydney Opera House, which he revitalised, and of London’s South Bank Centre, where he brought a reconstruction project to a successful conclusion many millions of pounds over budget. Since his London contract expired in 2008, Lynch has been back in Sydney, in the market for one last big job.

Hong Kong is a biggie, albeit corpse strewn. The last chief executive, Graham Sheffield, formerly of London’s Barbican Centre, quit at the New Year in the throes of a personal health crisis. He has since been appointed arts boss of the British Council, happily restored to health. 
Lynch has been sunning it long enough in Sydney to be in peak condition for the China post. It’s a tough job, with some very demanding bosses. If he pulls it off, it will be a mighty apotheosis of arts management.