Tom Roper's Weblog

A forensic use for iTunes

There are extraordinary goings-on in classical music, discussed at some length on this morning's CD Review on BBC Radio 3 . It is a technological detective story. Brian Ventura, put a CD of Lisztz's Transcendental Etudes, played by Joyce Hatto in his computer; the CDDB database iTunes uses decided it was by Lászlo Simon instead. He contacted the Gramophone, and tests were performed on recordings attributed to Hatto by Pristine Audio and Royal Holloway College's AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). These demonstrated that the recording sold under Hatto's name on her husband W.H. Barrington-Coupe's Concert Artist/Fidelio label are not by her but by other pianists. Hatto died last year and, the public were told, had been ill with cancer since the 1970s, causing her withdrawal form performance until the late flowering that the Concert Artists recordings purported to document. Barrington-Coupe, who has yet to make a statement on the recordings, served a prison sentence for tax evasion, according to the Daily Telegraph.
See the Guardian's obituary at the time of her death, for an example of some of the praise lavished on her recordings.

Technorati Tags: joycehatto

Fairyhouse, Kempton and Newcastle: Eider Chase Day

310 Kempton: Lucifer Bleu
330 Newcastle: Nil Desperandum
420 Fairyhouse: Jet Propelled

Après nous, le déluge, or e-commerce, Web 2.0 style

I send an official order to a institution for some goods they provide. They refuse it: they will only take orders with credit cards hand-written on a form one has to print from their website and then fax to them.
I have a telephone conversation with a pleasant woman. "Please tell me, why do you not accept official orders from a major university like us?" I ask. "Oh", she replies, "that would open the floodgates". I put the telephone down. What flood does she fear? A flood of customers wanting to spend money on buying her goods?

Librarian in the Guardian

The Guardian let Ian Snowley, CILIP's President-Elect, loose on Glen Berger's play Underneath the Lintel, showing at the Duchess Theatre. Ian writes in their Another View column; Lyn Gardner reviewed it for the paper proper, and started off with a wisecrack about the Dewey Decimal system.

The play's starting point is a librarian who finds a Baedeker returned, 113 years late. Ian seems to have enjoyed the play more than Lyn Gardner; "should be filed under G for guff", she says.

Links:
CILIP president elect's page
Ian's personal blog

Toytown democracy

Changes to the Radio 3 schedules have generated a predictable amount of heat. I can't say I'm that upset by any of them, though in order to do my ironing to the sound of Andy Kershaw, refreshed by a glass of gin, ironing night will have to move from Sunday to Monday.  I suppose it is liturgically more proper to have Choral Evensong on a Sunday, though, being an atheist, it matters little to me when I hear it. Listen again in any case diminishes the importance of scheduling. If only more programmes were offered as podcasts....
I am a veteran of Radio 3, and indeed Third Programme revamps . I can remember the dear dead days when This Week's Composer, as I think it was then called, could be heard at 9 in the morning.
What puzzles me though, is why the BBC did not take this chance to do away with their antiquated message boards, and replace them with something more Web 2.0-ish....a blog for each programme, with commenting enabled, as a very minimum; better still, linking outside the confines of the BBC website to what people saying about programmes elsewhere. The message boards are hideous, in appearance and functionality like nothing so much as an AOL chat room in the early 1990s, "toytown democracy," as Mark Ravenhill observes in this morning 's Guardian.

Patrick Hamilton: Slaves of Solitude

In keeping with this blog's reputation as a centre for Hamiltonia, which I'm not sure I deserve, I must note today's article in the Guardian by David Lodge on Slaves of Solitude.
I think the Slaves of Solitude is Hamilton's best novel, better even than Hangover Square. Lodge mentions a new NYRB Classics edition, out this month. There is also a Constable edition, published it last year, after too long a time out of print.

Technorati Tags: patrickhamil

Ascot, Haydock and Wincanton

Ascot 110: Nation State
Haydock 200: The Outlier
Ascot 220: Thisthatandtother
Wincanton 330: Straw Bear

A cretinous pastime

Out of the mouths of search engines: a Google search for the two words "cretinous" and "bingo", which I ran to check the provenance of a quotation in the weekend's Financial Times, found the Sun newspapers website as the fourth result. I wonder why?
The phrase is attributed to a Times leader in 1961 where they described the game of bingo as " a cretinous pastime".
Barker, Alex
Is bingo's number up?
Financial Times 9 February 2007

Bad Science, open access and the arms trade

This week's Bad Science column in the Guardian, whose author, Ben Goldacre, will be speaking at the Brighton Science Festival, discussed open access, in particular the news that some publishers, he doesn't say which, have hired Eric Dezenhall, the "pitbull of PR". I had not heard of Mr Dezenhall before I read the article. I look forward to Dezenhall's interventions in the open access debate. Neither did I know that Reed Elsevier include among their money making activities organising the DSEI arms fair.
I don't endorse the view that arms-dealing is abnormal. From a capitalist point of view, it is as reasonable to profit from of the labour of workers who make tanks and armoured cars as from those who create scientific research. But it does sit ill with publisher's rhetorical claims to be impartial and altruistic handmaidens of scientific communication.
Ben's blog is well worth a visit, not least for the sixteen (at the time of writing) posts tagged with the word "onanism".

Technorati Tags: reedelsevier

Newbury and Leopardstown

Leopardstown 220: Catch Me
Newbury 240: Kauto Star

Leopardstown 255: Chelsea Harbour

Newbury 315: Acambo
Newbury 350: Well Chief
Leopardstown 400: Forget the Past