The Greatest?
It's Mozart's 250th birthday today and what a grand old age to reach! So the BBC's website asks its readers "Was Mozart the greatest musical genius?", and I for one would like to add my two cents worth. Assessing the greatness of anything, and in particular people, is a risky business. After all what kind of unit is a 'great'?
A brief diversion on the "What is 'great'" topic for you all:
Mozart wrote a shed load of music in 35 years. Haydn wrote nearly four times the amount of Mozart in 70 years. Therefore where great = quantity of musical output, Haydn > Mozart.
That's not going to work... What's that saying; quality not quantity.
So, what if great = quality of musical output? Quality in any art form is usually loosely based on the number of people who appreciate, enjoy and like said art work. According to something I read a couple of weeks ago, if you ask people to name a classical composer they are most likely to say Mozart. Therefore, if a high percentage of people say Mozart, Mozart is the greatest.
Again, this doesn't appear to satisfy.
So here are my rules for calmly and level-headedly assessing the life and time of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, remember them, and they will serve you well in surviving this day of Mozart-based madness...
1. The first rule of music history is that it is the historians chose whose lives to record
Mozart had a prolific letter writing habit that he picked up during his extensive travels in both childhood and adulthood. Largely thanks to these letters his life is unusually easy to document. In fact, you can buy a book of all his own and his family's letters, it's about 1000 pages long and printed on what I would term 'bible paper' (you know, the very thin stuff). No other composer of that era has left behind such a wonderful primary source for historians to work with. However, reading between the lines is necessary with this tome because a fairly large quantity of the letters say nothing whatsoever about music. And it is this reading between the lines that causes some documenters of Mozart's life to take liberties (read Charles Hazelwood, but that's an entirely different blog). All this is beside the point. Essentially Mozart has been chosen to be great because he left behind a wealth of information, relevant or not, for historians to play with. This should be the first thing anyone studying music should be told.
2. The second rule of music history is that making nice with Baron von Swieten is handy
The Baron von Swieten, ah, bless his soul! Without him Mozart's work would have probably sat locked in a dusty corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire waiting for some unassuming musician to give it a turn. Baron von Swieten is instrumental in all of the following events; firstly, performing Mozart's works post-death, secondly, for giving Beethoven enough money to cut and run from traditional patronage arrangements (something that music historians will tell you led to trail-blazing creativity - there is some truth in this), and thirdly, for building interest around the music of JS Bach, a torch later carried and run with by Mendelssohn. Well done, Herr von Swieten. Just think of all those dusty manuscripts that are still sitting in the furthest corner of the former empire and have never been heard.
3. The third rule of music history is that it's better to burn out than to fade away
Perhaps more evidence of this syndrome in the popular music canon, but many people speculate about what could have been, if Mozart had continued to write music in the early C19th, and if he'd finished his requiem mass. Mozart is documented as being a bit of a wild child; again how much of this is true is open to interpretation. No one really knows how he died; was it syphilis, or a bad pork chop? Did he have Tourette's syndrome? As Milos Forman will have us believe, was he an alcoholic? Adulation of the young, tortured musician seems to capture everyone's imagination; Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Buckley, Ian Curtis, WA Mozart...
In summary (although the summary is looking longer than the actual blog):
Genius and greatness are two heavily loaded terms that should be used with maximum caution. Greatest should emphatically never be used. Yes, Mozart was prolific, in a short life, and he had his achievements, but the greatest? I personally think there is no greatest, in anything. As an aside, this is why everyone loves those "Top 100" programmes, because it gives you something to agree or disagree with. Humans have this wonderful habit of never being able to 100% agree with one another, which does make the world an interesting place. To summarise Mozart you could say something like, "there is an element of greatness to Mozart's brief but bright musical career." That would be fair.
"History is bunk" to quote Henry Ford. Whilst I don't entirely agree with Mr Ford, it is important to remember that the reason one person is lauded over and above another usually comes down to some fairly basic and unfair selection criteria. Mozart left more behind, because he travelled a great deal, and he left a lot of information in the hands of a powerful patron of the arts. Unfair, but convenient.
Never believe Charles Hazelwood, well occasionally you can, but it's just safer to disregard the 'evidence' he supplies.
One of my favourite pieces of Mozart information, and a brilliant musical achievement, is that he was instrumental in inventing and popularising German language opera. Quite logically, he couldn't understand why all these German-speaking Austrians wanted to go and see operas sung in Italian. So, against the wishes of his patron (the emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire), he just went wrote and opera in German. You go Mozart, next stop Wagner...
Ignore anything you read about the 'Mozart Effect' (click here for a decent overview). I know plenty of really clever people who were reared on hairspray rock, 80s cheese, and either still don't listen to classical music or were only introduced to the genre later in life. This is total nonsense. Anyone interested in joining me for a ceremonial burning of the latest Classic FM money spinner?
And finally, any writings in the field of music rely heavily on opinion, so feel free to entirely disregard the entirity of the above. If you love your Mozart and are willing to give him the title of 'greatest musical genius' please post with opinions.
Much like Beethoven, I am having trouble finishing this, so one last thought... Happy Birthday Mozart! Much of your music gives me great pleasure, however Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is frankly a bit under par for you...
Popularity: 25% [?]
Billwatch II
Another gem of an article from Bill Thompson.
This time he's ranting about Google, which recently agreed to censor search results typed into their Chinese portal - words like 'democracy', 'freedom', 'falun gong', etc.
The funny thing is that his article comes out in favour of this
Supporters of free speech and open societies should be supporting Google rather than lambasting it.
Obviously. This makes perfect sense.
Amidst all the fuss about Google's decision to comply with local law in China it is easy to overlook the fact that internet (sic) content is censored and controlled almost everywhere.
Which apparently makes it okay.
He then launches into a massive rant about how companies in the UK censor online content - using the example that BT have a 'service' which denies access to pages which may contain images of child abuse without letting you know that you've requested banned content. Google, he argues, are okay because at least they will tell you that access to the resources returned as results of your search terms are banned by local law. The technology parallels may be there, but from a social context his argument seems a little warped.
Then follows a little bit of 'I art Googlier than thou' (he's been following the company for some time) and a bit of Microsoft bashing (an easy target?). But then he completely loses the plot and turns his little tirade into a call for Western powers to extend the olive branch of diplomacy to China, comparing sanctions imposed against South Africa to encourage the end of apartheid to Internet companies not dealing with China in an attempt to promote free speech.
Never mind that earlier in the article he establishes that this is not the case, by pointing out that many online based companies (Yahoo, MSN and yes, even Google) are already operating in China, making his point redundant.
As if Google or MSN withholding their search engines from China are even remotely comparable to UN imposed economic sanctions.
Honestly, this kind of egotistical technocratic drivel really irritates me. I'm surprised he didn't manage to fit Web 2.0 into the article somewhere.
Popularity: 8% [?]
The Alphabet Girls
I am a little late seasonally in posting this, but could this be the reason that Flash exists?
Popularity: 8% [?]
Scanner photography
http://www.scannerphotography.com
Pretty amazing stuff...
Popularity: 8% [?]
Technolust strikes again
The problem with being a geek is that you tend to be prone to sudden fits of insatiable technolust.
The object of my affections today is the Game Boy micro. After a conversation with Pete last night about the deliciously retro Famicom style version (we thought it was Game And Watch) , I decided to check it out.
And that's when it started to take hold.
What can I say? It's tiny, so you can throw it in a bag or put it in your pocket without worrying about it taking up too much room. It comes with rechargeable batteries and you can buy a USB charger, so no more bulky power supplies taking up plug sockets. It's got a much more sensible button layout than the Game Boy Advance SP. And damn it, it just plain looks good. I kind of fancy a silver one with a black facia, where the screen is behind the fascia and only visible when it's turned on, although that might end up looking a little too much like a PSP.
Ah, the PSP. Much like the iMac and MacBook Pro mentioned in a previous posting, I've tried really, really hard to cultivate this sort of lust for one, but so far I haven't made it. It's expensive, it's huge and aside from the Grand Theft Auto game and one that's a bit like Columns for the Game Gear, there hasn't been any 'must play' buzz surrounding any of the titles that I've noticed. It also uses expensive proprietary media (I'm looking at you, memory sticks) and I don't really fancy the idea of buying movies on UMD disks as I can't see myself watching them enough times to warrant it and converting them to another format to get a bit more use out of them would be an absolute arse.
Then there's the GP2X. This one has a few things going for it. It's cheaper than the PSP, uses cheap as chips SD cards for storage, has TV-out and is very, very developer friendly - it runs Linux (sort porting useful applications like mplayer, VLC, etc should be relatively easy) and has a publicly available Developer Kit and toolchain. The SD card reportedly supports SDIO cards, so you should be able to use stuff like SDIO WiFi cards and the like if drivers become available. The downside, of course, is that there are no recognisable games available for it, largely limiting you to emulators and home-brew stuff. There are a couple of GBA emulators for it, but all I see is poor framerates, lack of updates, trouble and faff. They are at a very early stage however, so it might be worth checking back in six months or so. Battery life is also supposed to be poo and it looks a little chunky compared to the micro.
Consequently all roads appear to lead to the micro. However I am a little concerned that it may be a little too small for my big clunky hands and the cost of the micro and a linker makes it more than the GP2X. I also already have a GBA emulator on my telephone, so it's not as it I really need a dedicated gaming machine. Oh, and I'm skint. Which kind of puts paid to that one...
Popularity: 5% [?]
Intel Macs
Is it just me, or is anyone else having a hard time getting excited about the new Intel iMac and MacBook Pro? Aside from the laptop's terrible name, both bits of kit look like they should be sure fire winners. I'm told that the processors used in the new Intel Macs are clock for clock faster than the G5 processors they replace (and kick the G4 all over the park to boot).
A dual core laptop? Yes please. Granted it has some shortcomings - the DVD drive is not dual layer, the screen is slightly small than the PowerBooks, and it's missing some output dongles. But for the speed increase I can live with that - DL media is still pretty expensive and regular DVDs are pretty cavernous, 60 pixels isn't that much and you can buy the dongles separately while only have a vague feeling of price gouging.
A desktop Mac that's potentially faster than a current dual core G5 PowerMac and comes with a gorgeous 20" screen? Tasty. Kodawarisan has just posted pictures of a disassembled Intel iMac. From this picture it looks like the CPU is socketed rather than soldered onto the motherboard which could make for pretty easy upgrades using cheap commodity parts - no more expensive processor cards. What's not to like?
Software. That's what. By releasing the Intel Macs six months early, it seems to have taken most developers by surprise. There are a lot of small applications that have already been released as universal binaries, but where are the Adobe CS suites, the Microsoft Offices and the Macromedia Studios? Even Apple's own 'pro' applications (Final Cut, et al) are a couple of months off, as is Firefox. I was told that Macrodobia would get their apps out by the end of the year, which is great, but we are at the beginning of the year. Coincidentally that is when the Intel PowerMacs (MacMacs?) are to be released, although going by last weeks announcements, that could change.
I think that part of the problem is the secrecy Apple like to shroud their development products in. Developers have had (to my admittedly rather limited knowledge) no access to pre-release machines. Normally this would not be a problem as from revision to revision not much changes, but we are talking a totally different processor architecture. There's an article on MacNN where Microsoft say they are waiting for delivery of shipping machines to 'better evaluate ... the final release date of Mac Office'. This may be spin/playing for time, but if they had access to them before they were announced, at least that would be an excuse they could not use.
Development kits have been available but these do not contain the same hardware as found in the new Macs. For example, they are single core Pentium 4 machines. One advantage Apple have in this switch is that they do not have to support legacy hardware - such as the Pentium 4, so no developer has been able to code CPU instructions specific to the Yonah processor family (which would lead to speed increases usually around 10% like setting the -march GCC flag to your CPU type) as they just haven't been available. Sure you could work from Intel's documentation but without a means to test what you had just written, it would be a bit like fumbling around in the dark.
Another thing that bothers me is that in July of last year, Apple froze development for the Cocoa-Java bridge - no new features of Cocoa would be added to it, essentially removing the point of developing Cocoa apps in Java. For the uninitiated, a big thing Java has going for it is that you can write platform independent code. You write your application, compile it, and it will run on anything (Intel, PPC, Alpha, Sparc, your telephone, your fridge, whatever) that has a Java Virtual Machine available for it, which is pretty much everything. Cocoa is the framework that lets you use things like OS X specific buttons and scrollbars, etc and is very much tied to OS X and is usually invoked using Objective-C. The Cocoa-Java bridge then, allows you to use Cocoa classes in Java for that authentic Mac look and feel. Of course this robs you of being able to run your Java program on Windows, but who cares as if it's well designed, you should be able to port the core of it (written in pure Java) and just re-write the user interface in Swing or SWIG or whatever. The release of the Intel version of OS X will obviously have the Cocoa framework implemented natively on Intel hardware. Consequently, if you've used the Cocoa-Java bridge to write your application, it should run on the new Intel Macs with no tweaking whatsoever. This would obviously greatly speed the deployment of Intel OS X applications, but, with no more development being done on the Cocoa-Java bridge, it's not going to happen as who wants to be stuck using a dead API? What's really a kick in the teeth is that they froze development after announcing the move to Intel.
It all looked so promising last year, the transition looked like it was going to go very smoothly. Now we have amazing hardware - that PowerBook update that everyone was waiting for - but no software to run on it, for now. All eyes to the WWDC in June...
Popularity: 6% [?]
Spam filter
Owing the to the almost ludicrous amount of spam this blog sees, I've started using a rather excellent looking web service called Akismet which is based around a plugin for the blog software WordPress.
The idea is that you submit all comment traffic to their service, they run a bunch of checks on it and some associated meta data and it return a boolean value as to whether or not the comment is spam.
The idea is very good, but in practice it might be a little harsh - I've had no comment spam make it through for the last week, but then again I've had no comments make it through either.
Thankfully, you can help train the filter by subitting false positives and uh, true negatives(?). Consequently comments that get caught by the filter will now await moderation rather than be dropped automatically, so don't despair if you get bitten.
I like it so much, I've written a PHP5 class you can use to include Akismet functionality in your own web adventures.
- Update -
Matt Mullenweg (the guy behind Akismet) has blogged about my PHP class and added it to the development page on the Akismet website. This makes me very happy.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Mac World San Francisco today
Don't get excited by the possibility of 2.8GHz dual core Mac minis
Don't get excited by the possibility of 2.8GHz dual core Mac minis
Don't get excited by the possibility of 2.8GHz dual core Mac minis
Don't get excited by the possibility of 2.8GHz dual core Mac minis
Don't get excited by the possibility of 2.8GHz dual core Mac minis
Wow. Did I just spam my own blog?
Thing is, if the idea is to have a Mac based PVR, it will need some serious horsepower to play back uncompressed HD MPEGs (not that I have a HD TV or the capability to receive HD content yet, but still). My 1.4Ghz Mac mini can't do it without dropping frames - although my 1.4Ghz Athlon can. *shrugs* See the box out on this page over at the EFF site to test your own computer. In fact, most guides to creating your own Mac mini based PVR currently recommend at least a dual G4 desktop and preferably a G5 for the media playback, which obviously takes the shine off having such a diminutive box in your living room.
We shall see...
Popularity: 5% [?]
Quick Alacarte fix
For anyone experiencing the following error with Alacarte, (the Gnome menu editor that almost actually lets you edit the menus):
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 26, in ?
main()
File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 23, in main
GnomeFront()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/Alacarte/GnomeFront.py", line 72, in __init__
self.loadMenus()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/Alacarte/GnomeFront.py", line 201, in loadMenus
self.app_handler = MenuHandler('applications.menu', self.options)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/Alacarte/PyXDGMenuHandler.py", line 27, in __init__
xdg.MenuEditor.MenuEditor.__init__(
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/MenuEditor.py", line 28, in __init__
self.parse(menu, filename, root)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/MenuEditor.py", line 40, in parse
self.menu = parse(menu)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 517, in parse
__parse(doc, filename, tmp["Root"])
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 538, in __parse
__parseMenu(child, filename, parent)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 692, in __parseMenu
__parse(child, filename, m)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 576, in __parse
__parseMergeFile("applications.menu", child, filename, parent)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 743, in __parseMergeFile
__mergeFile(os.path.join(p,rel_file),child,parent)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 792, in __mergeFile
__parse(child,filename,parent)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 587, in __parse
__parseDefaultMergeDirs(child, filename, parent)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 763, in __parseDefaultMergeDirs
__parseMergeDir(os.path.join(dir, "menus", basename + "-merged"), child, filename, parent)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 756, in __parseMergeDir
__mergeFile(os.path.join(value, item), child, parent)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 792, in __mergeFile
__parse(child,filename,parent)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 538, in __parse
__parseMenu(child, filename, parent)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 692, in __parseMenu
__parse(child, filename, m)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 572, in __parse
parent.Rules.append(Rule(child.tagName, child))
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 284, in __init__
self.compile()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py", line 290, in compile
exec("""
File "<string>", line 6
elif :
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax</string>Change line 290 of the file /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/xdg/Menu.py from:
elif %s:
to
elif (%s):
and you should be right as rain. I don't know any Python, but I believe it's picky about tab indentation (which this blog ham fistedly turns into multiple non-breaking line spaces), so watch yourself.
Popularity: 6% [?]