Category: Classical Music

Today is November 22nd 2023. It happens to be Benjamin Britten's 110th birthday; the feast day of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music and musicians... and, at last, the release day of Giocoso Version 3, this website's homebrew classical music listening software. It all seems so spookily appropriate!

The user manual for it is now therefore available in the usual place. I encourage you to read all of it, of course: but if not that, then at least Sections 2, 3 and 4. [...] 

I'm now in Giocoso 3 documentation mode: writing up what functionality exists; what functionality doesn't exist; and how best to use the software to do its principal job of playing classical music in a quasi-intelligent way.

There are (pause to count...) 28 distros to install onto, perform functional tests and make notes on quirks, weirdnesses and showstoppers. Each distro tends to ship with three or four desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, Budgie, Pantheon, XFCE and the like), so the number of permutations at this stage is a bit bewildering. Not to say, time consuming. [...] 

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! [...] 

Just a short note to advise that at some point today^†, we're having solar panels fitted. That means the electricity will have to be turned off for (so we are told) "a number of hours". That in turn means the web server hosting this site will... er, stop hosting it, for a number of hours!

The short version is: I'll have to go off-line at some point today^†, but normal service should resume a few hours thereafter. [...] 

I just wanted to put on record that I was sorry to have to cease my membership of the GMG Classical Music Forum a week or so ago. There were at least a half-dozen members there whose contributions I valued highly (Harry, Vandermolen, Karl Henning and others, for example). There were dozens more who were utterly decent people with a lot to contribute. There were also terribly pretentious Irish members, as well as at least one Australian member with zero sense of humour; but these were in a minority, whom it was easy to ignore.

Unfortuately, there were several members who thought that, presented with a CD album art image of a female artist, it was OK to comment on her cleavage. One in particular, was recorded to have posted, "Poor girl. She can't even find a dress to fit", because a bit of cleavage was visible in the black dress sported by the fine, professional and highly-skilled pianist in question. The poster was 74 and, I think, ought to have known better that women do sport cleavages but that one doesn't reduce a highly-skilled, professional woman to her cleavage. Some of us could hear the heavy breathing and dripping spittle accompanying such commentary. [...]