Music in the Media

[Arthur Stone]

A short film covering the Quadrophenia period: great narrative from Pete Townsend...quality audio and visuals...

Available until Monday 9th July, 2012...get one while they're hot...

BBC iPlayer - Quadrophenia: Can You See the Real Me? Unavailable now: This link still has some articles and clips from the show

In his home studio and revisiting old haunts in Shepherds Bush and Battersea, Pete Townshend opens his heart and his personal archive to revisit 'the last great album the Who ever made', one that took the Who full circle back to their earliest days via the adventures of a pill-popping mod on an epic journey of self-discovery.

But in 1973 Quadrophenia was an album that almost never was. Beset by money problems, a studio in construction, heroin-taking managers, a lunatic drummer and a culture of heavy drinking, Townshend took on an album that nearly broke him and one that within a year the band had turned their back on and would ignore for nearly three decades.

With unseen archive and in-depth interviews from Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, John Entwistle and those in the studio and behind the lens who made the album and thirty page photo booklet.

Contributors include: Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Ethan Russell, Ron Nevison, Richard Barnes, Irish Jack Lyons, Bill Curbishley, John Woolf, Howie Edelson, Mark Kermode and Georgiana Steele Waller.

***WARNING: Contains footage of desirable high-end audio equipment. Viewer discretion advised***

[Arthur Stone]

Woody Guthrie

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...Woody_Guthrie/

Documentary on the life of Woody Guthrie, the travelling songwriter and singer who paved the way for the likes of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912, Guthrie became a spokesman for a whole generation of downtrodden Americans during the 1930's with poignant songs like Vigilante Man, Pastures of Plenty and the anthemic This Land is Your Land.

With Jack Elliot, Pete Seeger, Alan Lomax, Arlo Guthrie and Arthur Stern.

Available until Fri 14th November 2014

[Arthur Stone]

Making Tracks - Rockfield Studios
BBC iPlayer - Making Tracks: Episode 1

Good narrative by Paul Morley - examines the wider state of the industry through the Rockfield lens.

Cultural commentator Paul Morley explores a history of popular music through some of the iconic recording studios in which classic albums were created. In future programmes he revisits some of the classical masterpieces recorded in the 80 year old Abbey Road Studios and cutting edge pop in Metropolis, the studio complex built when the music industry was at its most bloated peak. But he begins in the rural heart of Monmouthshire - at a studio that grew out of a farm and gave birth to some of rock music's finest recordings - everything from Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" to the Stone Roses' eponymous debut album, from Dr. Feelgood's "Down By The Jetty" to Oasis' "(What's The Story) Morning Glory", even from the Waterboys' "Fisherman's Blues" to Adam Ant's "Kings Of THe Wild Frontier". Those trying to explain what part the studio played in creating such musical magic include performers (the veteran Dave Edmunds and the newcomers Iko), technicians (John Leckie and Sean Genockey) and the people who (in some cases, quite literally) built the studio and the business (father and daughter, Kingley and Lisa Ward, and Terry Matthews). As the money flowing through the music industry continues to dry up - Paul also asks what future there may be or the historic recording studios that helped build the industry in the first place?

Producer: Paul Kobrak.

Available until 1st January 2099

More episodes to come: Abbey Road & Metropolis.

[Arthur Stone]

A precipient 30 year-old French documentary about Peter Gabriel and the Fairlight CMI; Peter discusses how technology and global influences will transform music:


...also a Guardian article with Peter Gabriel in which he discusses WOMAD: Peter Gabriel on 30 years of Womad – and mixing music with politics | Music | The Guardian

[Arthur Stone]

Radio programme (14mins): Key Matters - G minor

Ivan Hewett explores the way in which different musical keys appear to have unique characteristics of their own. In this programme, Ivan is joined by musicologist Cliff Eisen to explore the key of G minor, a favourite key of Mozart's for expressing failure, anger and loss.

BBC iPlayer - Key Matters: Series 3: G Minor
Available until 1st January 2099


I've really enjoyed this series...will post links to the other keys as they become available.

[Arthur Stone]

Making Tracks - Abbey Road

BBC iPlayer - Making Tracks: London's Abbey Road

This is Part 2 of the excellent radio series in which Paul Morley visits famous recording studios and explores the recording process...interesting discussion about dynamic range with orchestral examples.

Cultural commentator Paul Morley explores a history of popular music through some of the iconic recording studios in which classic albums were created.

Without them music as we know it would simply not exist. There'd be no technology to capture the sounds envisaged by the musicians and created and enhanced by the engineers and producers... and there'd be no music for the record companies to market and distribute. But more than that, the studios actually played a crucial part in the structure and fabric of the music recorded there - the sounds enhanced by the studio space itself... the potential and shortcomings of the equipment and technology housed in the cubicles... and the ability and 'vision' of the engineers and producers operating it all to find the new sound that makes the recordings sound different and fresh.

Today he visits the world's first purpose built recording studio, and possibly the most famous: the one at No 3, Abbey Road, a stone's throw from a much photographed zebra crossing in London's St John's Wood. Opened by Sir Edward Elgar conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in a recording of "Land Of Hope And Glory", the studios went on to record everyone from Adam Ant, The Bolshoi and Nick Cave... to XTC, Diana Yakawa and the Zombies - to say nothing of Pink Floyd and the Beatles.

But that's not what's drawn Paul Morley to these historic recording rooms - it's the continuing work in capturing the sound of orchestras that is put under the spotlight in this programme. With the help of engineers and producers, composers and those that keep the studios running on a day to day basis, Paul explores how the relationship classical music has with the recording studio differs from the one that pop music enjoys.

Producer: Paul Kobrak.

Available until 1st January 2099

[Arthur Stone]

Making Tracks - Metropolis
BBC iPlayer - Making Tracks: Metropolis

...In the final programme of the series Paul Morley ventures to West London and one of the last major studio complexes to be built in the heyday of the music industry. But without an exalted musical history to fall back on and decades of experience to help run it, how do you go about creating a world-class facility frequented by the likes of Amy Winehouse, Mick Jagger and Rihanna... and how do you keep it going when all around you are closing their doors?

Producer: Paul Kobrak.

Available until 1st January 2099

Highly recommended.

[Arthur Stone]

Darwin's Tune
BBC iPlayer - Darwin's Tunes

A radio programme that examines the theory of evolution through natural selection as applied to music and composition.

Is our taste in music, and how it's changed over the centuries, governed by creative genius or simply by survival of the fittest sounds, chosen by us the consumer? Does Darwin's theory of natural selection apply to more than just life on the planet? The idea of survival of the fittest and cultural evolution can be applied to many aspects of our lives; from fashion to the naming of our children. In a world of digital sampling evolutionary biologist, Professor Armand Leroi of Imperial College and his colleagues have designed an experiment to see if they can create the perfect song by asking individuals to choose which tunes survive and reproduce to create new tunes and which ones die out. If they can do this, where does that leave today's musical producers and composers? Do we still need a trained mind to compose truly amazing music? Armand Leroi discusses the idea that music evolves with evolutionary biologists Dr Luke Rendell of St Andrews University and Professor Mark Pagel of Reading University, composer Dr Martin Parker of Edinburgh University, and composer Aphrodite Raickopoulou.

Producer: Ania Lichtarowicz.

Available until 1st January 2099

[ritelec]

Originally Posted by Arthur Stone

Started this thread as a reminder about radio and TV programmes (music production and audio engineering); rather than start a new thread for each show, I'll post scheduling news as it happens. Please feel free to add to the list.


Most of these shows will be available on BBC iPlayer for some time after the live broadcast; not sure on availability outside UK but if there's enough interest perhaps the BBC will make this possible. Credit to the BBC for their history of music/audio programming.


I'll delete the posts when programmes become unavailable.

thanks arthur

[Arthur Stone]

from ted.com:
Nothing is original, says kirby ferguson, creator of everything is a remix. From bob dylan to steve jobs, he says our most celebrated creators borrow, steal and transform. Kirby ferguson explores creativity in a world where "everything is a remix."

Great response by Dylan to the issues raised in the video: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012...as?INTCMP=SRCH

[Arthur Stone]

Radio: In the Lounge with Rich Morton
BBC iPlayer - In the Lounge with Rich Morton

Another great music show from the Beeb; it offers an interesting perspective on Lounge...cool music too.

For many casual listeners, the music usually defined as 'lounge' may conjure up something kitsch and outdated, bringing to mind the world of Austin Powers or the sentimental, string-sodden arrangements of their parents' record collections. As comedian, composer and lounge aficionado Rich Morton discovers, there's a large and healthy subculture of lounge lovers who view it as anything but outdated. For the past twenty years, clubs devoted to lounge music have been thriving, and several successful series of lounge compilations have brought obscure and sought-after tracks by some of the greatest 20th century pop and jazz performers to the ears of a new generation.

As a composer and collector of lounge tunes, Rich goes in search of the alchemy that produces a lounge classic: whether it's the voice of a Rat Pack regular, the tight brassy arrangement of a Neil Hefti or a Quincy Jones, the timeless simplicity of a Burt Bacharach or Tony Hatch melody - or simply a mood, something indefinable, laid-back, evocative of a time and a place that's anywhere but here...

Producer: Paul Bajoria.

Available until 1st January 2099

[Arthur Stone]

TV: The Devil's Music

Stunning old-school blues...

BBC iPlayer - The Devil's Music: Series 2: Episode 1

First transmitted in 1979, Alexis Korner delves into the soulful world of traditional black American Blues music. Exploring its origins and reviewing unique footage of acclaimed Blues artists including Sonny Blake, Sam Chatmon, Houston Stackhouse and Booker White.

Available until 1st January 2038.

Originally Posted by ritelec

thanks arthur

YVW - the BBC have a great archive. Fulll credit to the producers and technicians for creating these wonderful programmes. I'm looking forward to the next blues episode!

[Arthur Stone]

TV The Devils Music - episode 2:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...s_2_Episode_2/

Available until: 1st Jan. 2038

[Arthur Stone]

BBC Radio 4 (30 mins): BBC iPlayer - Digital Human: Series 2: Episode 1

There's an interesting discussion about the interaction between DAW tech and traditional music in Mali.

Aleks Krotoski returns with a new series of explorations of our digital world.

In the first in the series Aleks looks at how different cultures are preserving their identity in the face of the homogenising effects of technology.

There's a fear that the digital world will make us all the same. But that doesn't seem that well founded if you look at how widely differing cultures are using technology to express their identity and values. We look at the music sharing culture of Mali in West Africa as explored by musicologist Chris Kirkley and hear from the vibrant and intoxicating atmosphere of the mobile phone music market in Mali's capital Bamako. Back in the UK we look at the interesting way immigrant communities maintain their cultural ties through technology and the unexpected effect this has on the growth of immigrant communities.

Aleks also talks to explorer in residence Robin Hanbury-Tenison about his thoughts on how technology might be undermining cultures. Does he see the spread of digital as a new form of cultural imperialism?

Producer Peter McManus

Available until 1st January 2099

[hypetrain]

Loving these. Thank you for sharing them Arthur. Looking forward to hearing more.

Don't mean to derail, just adding to the thread... I like this podcast called New Sounds from NPR:
New Sounds Podcast : NPR Podcasts
Maybe someone else will enjoy it as well. It's a show featuring music that we might not hear normally.

[Arthur Stone]

TV (60 mins):

Part 1: The Age of Discovery

BBC iPlayer - Howard Goodall's Story of Music: The Age of Discovery

An inspiring travelogue through the history of music; excellent BBC soundtrack, lot's of well presented info...

Today music is available everywhere, at the press of a button, but a thousand years ago it was an eery whisper in a desert of silence. However music has always been a crucial part of human existence. Archaeological evidence shows us that music - although we have absolutely no idea what it sounded like - was just as important a component of life in the Upper Paleolithic Age as it is today.

Howard Goodall charts the development of the oldest music that has come down to us from the ancient world intact, the 'Gregorian' chant. It started with a handful of monks singing the same tune in unison, without rhythm, without harmony. Over several centuries, with developments coming at a snail's pace, medieval musicians painstakingly put together the basics of what we now call harmony and added rhythm. These are the building blocks of the music the whole planet enjoys today.

The arrival of a workable form of musical notation, around 1000 AD, gave music another shot in the arm. Now harmony could become ever more sophisticated. Not one, or two, but many voices. In Europe, at this point in history, music was something rarely heard outside church. Then, thanks in part to the development of more sophisticated musical instruments, folk music went from strength to strength. By 1600, secular music rivaled sacred music as the dominant form.

By the time Monteverdi wrote the first successful opera, in 1607, most of the kit of musical parts we still have today had been developed and honed - a process that took a thousand years. In Monteverdi's hands, using all the techniques then developed, music could express complex, conflicting, and even combustible political emotions.

Available until Sat, 23rd Feb. 2013


Part 2: The Age of Invention

BBC iPlayer - Howard Goodall's Story of Music: The Age of Invention

In the second programme, composer Howard Goodall looks at the extraordinarily fertile musical period between 1650 and 1750, in which many of the musical innovations we take for granted today were invented. The orchestra; the overture, which led, ultimately, to the symphony; satisfying chord sequences, which gave music a forward momentum; modern tuning, which, for the first time, allowed composers to move from one key to any other they chose, and for different instruments to easily play together; the concerto, the oratorio, and, not least, the piano.

In an age when Newton put in place the basic laws of science, musicians did the same thing in music. No wonder, in an age that also saw great advances in clock-making, that much of the music of this period sounds like the whirring, clicking and ticking of an intricate, magical machine.

This was the age of Corelli, Vivaldi, and the Four Seasons, Bach, and Handel. Vivaldi developed a form of concerto where a charismatic solo violin was pitted against the rest of the orchestra. Bach was the master of counterpoint, the interweaving and layering of tunes. All Bach's music was composed to glorify God. To do so, not least in his monumental St John and St Matthew Passions, he wrote some of the most subtly complex, heartfelt music of all time. Handel, most famously in Messiah, brought all the techniques of the preceding hundred years to a brilliant pitch, in a work that was as crowd-pleasing - and patriotic - as it was sacred. The paying public had arrived on the scene, and music was to change profoundly.

Every popular song written today still draws on the techniques developed in this extraordinary age of invention.

Available until 2nd March 2013


Part 3: The Age of Elegance and Sensibility

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...d_Sensibility/

Composer Howard Goodall looks at the age of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Chopin. This was an era - from 1750 to 1850 - in which composers went from being the paid, liveried servants of princes and archbishops to working as freelancers, who, most of all, needed to appeal to a new, middle-class audience. Or starve.

This period saw tremendous social upheaval. The American, French, and Industrial revolutions. And yet, until 1800 or so, composers for the most part wrote music that seemed oblivious to the tumultuous social changes unfolding all around it.

In this era, the symphony was born. Initially, as a musical form that was purely abstract, an enjoyable and brain-teasing meander through variations of a simple tune. The music of Haydn and Mozart - with the exceptions of some of Mozart's operas - ignored the darker side of life, and concentrated on the upside.

In the hands of Beethoven, though, the template for the tormented composer-as-genius, music radically changed gear. Beethoven's music became deadly serious, rather than aimed at pleasing an after-dinner audience. His orchestras grew bigger and bigger. Nature itself became a metaphor for the composer's own psychology. Beethoven's near contemporary, Schubert, brought the melancholy voice-and-piano love song to the status of high art. In the hands of an artist like Adele, it's still with us today.

Beethoven's Ode to Joy announced that music could, as he believed, convert the whole world to the ideal of universal brotherhood. That music should henceforth be about reforming humanity was a challenge that younger composers eagerly accepted.

Following Beethoven's lead in his Pastoral Symphony, a whole musical movement began that painted pictures in sound. Brilliantly in the hands of Mendelssohn. The Age of Elegance & Sensibility closes with Chopin, whose delicate, deceptively complex piano music inspired a generation to learn to play the new factory-made instruments, for which vast swathes of piano music was written. The piano, at last, gave women a chance to compose music.

Available until 9th March 2013

Part 4: The Age of Tragedy http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...ge_of_Tragedy/

[Arthur Stone]

TV (90 mins): When Albums Ruled The World
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...led_the_World/

Between the mid 1960s and the late 1970s, the long-playing record and the albums that graced its grooves changed popular music for ever. For the first time, musicians could escape the confines of the three-minute pop single and express themselves as never before across the expanded artistic canvas of the album. The LP allowed popular music become an art form - from the glorious artwork adorning gatefold sleeves, to the ideas and concepts that bound the songs together, to the unforgettable music itself.

Built on stratospheric sales of albums, these were the years when the music industry exploded to become bigger than Hollywood. From pop to rock, from country to soul, from jazz to punk, all of music embraced what 'the album' could offer. But with the collapse of vinyl sales at the end of the 70s and the arrival of new technologies and formats, the golden era of the album couldn't last forever.

With contributions from Roger Taylor, Ray Manzarek, Noel Gallagher, Guy Garvey, Nile Rodgers, Grace Slick, Mike Oldfield, Slash and a host of others, this is the story of When Albums Ruled the World.

Available until 20th Feb 2013

[Arthur Stone]

TV (60 mins)

BBC iPlayer - Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here

John Edginton's documentary explores the making of Pink Floyd's ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here, which was released in September 1975 and went to top the album charts both in the UK and the US.

Featuring new interviews with band members Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason alongside contributions from the likes of guest vocalist Roy Harper, sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson and photographer Jill Furmanovsky, the film is a forensic study of the making of the follow-up to 1973's Dark Side of the Moon, which was another conceptual piece driven by Roger Waters.

The album wrestles with the legacy of the band's first leader Syd Barrett, who had dropped out of the band in 1968 and is eulogised in the album's centrepiece, Shine On You Crazy Diamond. Pink Floyd had become one of the biggest bands in the world, but the 60s were over and the band were struggling both to find their purpose and the old camaraderie.

Available until Mon 18th Feb. 2013

[Arthur Stone]

TV (60 mins): BBC iPlayer - The Sound and the Fury: A Century of Music: Wrecking Ball

The culture of the early 20th-century was reflected in a change in musical expression...modernism and the avante garde create discordancy and atonality. Early punk.

Part 1: Wrecking Ball

The first episode looks at the shift in the language and sound of music from the beautiful melodies and harmonies of the giants of classical music such as Mozart, Haydn and Brahms into the fragmented, abstract, discordant sound of the most radical composers of the new century - Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky and beyond.

It examines how this new music, which can perplex and upset even the most contemporary of audiences, was a response to the huge upheaval in the world at the start of the 20th century - with its developments in technology, science, modern art and the tumult of the First World War.

Featuring specially-shot performances of some of the key works of the period, performed by the London Sinfonietta, members of the Aurora Orchestra and the American composer and pianist Timothy Andres, the story of this radical episode in music history is brought to life through the contributions of some of the biggest names in modern classical music, among them Steve Reich, John Adams, Michael Tilson Thomas, Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin and Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker.

From the atonal experiments of Vienna to the jazz-infused sounds coming from New York in the 1920s, the film travels the world to place this music in context and to uncover the incredible personalities and lives of the composers whose single-minded visions changed the course of classical music for ever.

Available until 5th March 2013