A Year In Which My World Continued Expanding

In a lecture at UCLA last October celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Internet Duran Duran bassist John Taylor made some interesting points about the influence of the internet on music making. Now that everything that has ever been recorded is just a few mouse clicks away it is easy to spend your time listening rather making music (or whatever).

I don't share his views, because for me the internet has opened up a whole new world. Like many people I made my list of best of albums of the year, but the real discovery for me over the past few weeks has been music that came out years or decades ago, but which I never had a chance of sampling. As I wrote some time ago the iPod has truly enriched my life. In the past if you wanted to hear a new album you had to go to a music store and stand there listening for a few minutes. Now you can listen to a streaming version or download it, if you know where to find or search for it.

I not only rediscovered music by composers I already knew, sort of, I also discovered composers that I'd never heard of. So within a few weeks time my iPod filled with music by Iannis Xenakis, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Horatio Radulescu, Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveros, Salvatore Sciarrino, Helmut Lachenmann, John Cage, Pascal Dusapin, Anouar Brahem and more. Most of this is "avant garde" contemporary "classical" music, I put those terms between brackets, because they are essentially meaningless, that is hard to find and that I wouldn't really listen to in a shop.

Some dj's are also doing sets with highly eclectic mixes. The result is not always as good, but it is exciting.

A recording of John Taylor's lecture if you prefer to listen and watch rather than read.

In case you wonder who or what Duran Duran is, Save a Prayer, Rio, A View to a Kill and Planet Earth John Taylor is the guy playing bass. Imagine I wanted to look like that when I was in highschool. Ah well, that's another story.

The illustration is by Patrick Nagel and was the cover for Rio an album by Duran Duran.