Pandora

Another Internet classical music provider I've been told about is Pandora. Friends that have used it say it's good but my experience has not been so. Like all these so-called stations they use lots of JavaScript to make things work. Perhaps I'm handicapping myself by trying to protect myself, but I use FireFox with the NoScript add-on enabled. I also run under Linux and the KDE windowing system. It appears that the techies at Pandora must be MAC or Windows enthusiasts and never look at their stuff from a Linux-based browser. After telling Firefox/NoScript to allow Pandora's script, when I try to listen to something I get a funny smudge on my screen and nothing else. Certainly no music. So much for Pandora.

Many of these stations (and lots of other web sites) are using secondary web measuring tools like google-analytics, double-click and quantserv. I've got my browser configured to ignore these annoying and intrustive scripts. It's always seemed to me that sites that rely on these tracking tools are just lazy and unwilling to look at what their own servers generate in terms of logging. Why should the end user suffer additional network traffic after loading these pages which contains hidden links to other measuring sites. I'm old-fashioned I guess, but I don't approve of it.

Last.FM

I've stumbled upon another Internet classical music broadcasting system that seems pretty good, Last.FM. I haven't figured out all of its capabilities yet, but I does seem to have a lot of interesting music fitting my tastes. The pieces tend to be relatively short though I'm now listening to Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" which is 52 minutes long. The music is broadcast by a player imbedded within the Last.FM HTML page, though there are other ways to listen. If you go away from the Last.FM page you are listening to you loose the music, but if you pop into another Firefox tab, the playing continues. There is a way to use the Last.FM player in Linux, but the installation is by configuring and compiling from a tar ball. I tried installing it, but it complained about my system and wouldn't compile. Their in-page player buffers the music, so the occasional breaks I was hearing on Live365 and ShoutCast, caused by Comcast's router connectivity issues, don't appear as obvious. But if you inadvertently go to the Last.FM page playing the music and follow a link from there your music is gone.

Last.FM has "stations" which appear to be collections of similarly catalogued music. At first glance their classical listings aren't all that deep, but I've found their contemporary classical selections to be fairly extensive. I guess that shouldn't be too surprising given the nature of the site and the content.

Is the new "contemporary classical" music any good? I'm now listening to "The Storm" by Wojciech Kilar. Last.FM has a succinct biography of the composer being played, a dynamic Web 2.0 ajax feature. Kilar is a contemporary Polish composer mentioned along-side Pendereski and Gorecki. In checking on FM broadcasts, a Kilar composition was broadcast 4 times on 3 different stations over the last 5 years. The FM radio is not the way to get exposed to his music it seems.

Contemporary classical music and Geirr Tveitt

I went again to the music school at the University of Colorado (CU) for a concert Wednesday night. It was their Pendulum series, featuring contemporary music which included some student compositions and Stravinsky's "Les Noces". Some of was good, some not so good. CU's faculty and students are a great resource and most Tuesday nights find me there for recitals and performances. It's a wonderful thing to have access to such talent. To hear contemporary music "in the raw" is a great thing.

Since I can't hear my local FM station any more and since they discontinued playing any substantial contemporary music anyway, the Internet is my only source of exposure to new "contemporary classical" music other than local performances. I've been listening to contemporary music over the Internet though a site http://contemporary-classical.com/. This site is part of the Live365.com "network" which I started listening to when I had a wireless media center device. I got rid of that and now just listen to the "live365" network using one of my computers. Unfortunately, live365 got fancy and have their own "player", so I can't use my small handheld Nokia, my preferred device for listening at night,


Contemporary-classical.com introduced me to Geirr Tveitt, a Norwegian composer who lived until 1981. I've never heard of him until I came upon the end of one of his pieces being broadcast on Contemporary-classical.com. A day later I went to Amazon and ordered two of Tveitt's Cd's. As is often the case, you get additional music on the CD which you hadn't intended to buy but which came with the piece you did want. In this case, it was Tveitt's "Variations on a Folksong from Hardanger for two pianos and orchestra" from 1939. I ended up liking this much more than his Piano Concerto #4 "Aurora Borealis" which is what I ordered. I recommend the "Variations".

Tveitt's broadcasts on FM radio? Pretty skimpy. KVOD played the Piano Concerto #4 three times in the last 5 years and always late a night. KING and KUSC seem to like Tveitt much more, though, surprisingly, WQXR hasn't played him at all in the last 5 years. And my favorite "Variations"? It has not been broadcast at all by any of the stations I monitor. Too bad.

Listening to "Internet" classical music

A few weeks back I received email from someone on the KVOD staff. She had found my web site which catalogs KVOD's and other classical FM radio playlists and said she liked my site. She asked if I could get KVOD after they switched to a newer, much weaker frequency. I told her No, KVOD was too weak and that I had given up on trying to listen to it either at home or in the car. Try new stuff she suggested. Spend $350 and get a Squeezebox to hear Internet Radio! Try an HD Radio, after I buy a new one for each of my rooms where I have radios. She reminded me of George Bush after 9/11 telling us to go out and spend!

Using the internet to listen to classical music is possible, but it's a bit of a weak soup. Sure I can listen to KVOD on any of my computers, but why would I do that? The Internet makes available stations from around the world, so why listen to cow-town Denver? I've tracked their broadcasts for years and they prefer broadcasting predictable "popular" easy-listening music, almost always short. They've shrunk their broadcasts of contemporary classics and really push the pap.

So given that I have a world-wide choice of internet classical music, what's the problem? Connectivity, in a word. I'm a Comcast subscriber and have been for many years. They are okay, but while listening to internet music, I get frequent breaks in the music. It just stops for a while, then comes back. It really adds to the music, inserting 'rests' where the composer forgot to write them. ;)

I use SSH to connect to my server to maintain my web sites. All too often I'm in the middle of a session and my keystrokes stop. A high percentage of the time I'm just thrown off and I have to start all over again. I've been noticing this for years with SSH so I wrote a little perl program to ping my external router, the one that my Comcast-supplied modem is connected to. My techie friends tell me that I should always be able to ping my router and that it should always be there. Such is not my case. I've seen it go away for fairly lengthy periods of time, with the blinking lights on the modem confirming what my computer tells me. At other times it just comes and goes. In the last 10 minutes or so, 78% of the pings got through fine, and the rest of the time I had between a 20% and 100% packet loss. Fortunately I can listen to my own mp3 library and avoid these unexpected 'rests' in the music.