Month: August 2023

An IT Tour

Posted on by hjr

A recent correspondent put me in mind of the fact that, having at last settled into my new home, it was perhaps time to do a sort-of guided tour through it as far as explaining what, technologically speaking, makes my music play. I notice, for example, that just a few weeks ago I took a photo of my music 'cabinet' in which an Apple Mac Mini (vintage 2012) took pride of place as the music-producing PC. Well, that's not true these days (as regular readers will probably know, I suffer from a bad case of operating system re-installationitis, with consequent side-effects of PC moving-aroundism):

As you can see, I don't exactly do a lot of dusting! As you can also see, the Mac Mini has been replaced by my Raspberry Pi 4: though it can have a fan fitted to keep it cool, mine is housed within an aluminium case that acts as a very good passive heatsink. Temperatures are therefore seldom above 50°C, and I've accordingly not bothered to fit the fan: the Pi is completely silent in operation in consequence ...and that's a key requirement of any IT equipment that sits in my music listening room (for hopefully obvious reasons!) [...] 

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Milestones

Posted on by hjr

At last, I've just added the 600th composer to my music collection. The composer in question is Cipriano Potter, whose grim visage you see at the left. Despite his first name, he was born and bred in London, UK (in 1791, in fact, dying some 80 years later, in 1871). His music is not especially well-known, though he was on first name terms with Beethoven (who thought him 'a good fellow') and Wagner called him an 'amiable contrapuntist'. His obscurity owes much to his decision to stop composing completely around his 45th year so that he could concentrate on his administration duties at the Royal Academy of Music, of which he was then principal. He was thus influential on English music, without necessarily having composed a lot of it (though he still managed to write nine symphonies, three piano concertos and a bazillion solo piano pieces).

I mention the new addition only because I remember being ticked off by a good friend of mine in Sydney, back in around 2005, that the fact that my music collection consisted mostly of Britten and Handel was "a bit sad". A pursuit of musical diversity on my part thus ensued, and I think my friend would be pleased today with the sexta-centennial results of his gentle nagging! [...] 

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