UnSilent Pandora and Chumby

I've been quiet lately. While I've been at a few musical events, nothing really sparkled. I heard two Brahms symphonies: the First by the Colorado Symphony, and the Second by the University of Colorado Orchestra. Neither grabbed my fancy, but it's Brahms, not the performances.

We attended a fun happening last Friday night -- the annual Boulder "UnSilent Night" boom-box procession on the Boulder Pearl Street Mall. Over 100 people participated, carrying a variety of music players, all playing one of the four tracks from Phil Kline's Christmas composition. It is a new-age sound that merges chimes and percussion and electronic sounds and choruses. On a crisp, clear night the sounds are wonderful as they merge and reverberate from the buildings. Many thanks to Dan Kellogg from the CU School of Music for starting and coordinating this.

I've been watching Pandora pervade more and more devices. Nightly I listen from my Chumby next to my bed. I can listen to Pandora from my main Linus workstation and from my Mac iBook. My iPod touch has a Pandora App and now I've configured my Roku to stream Pandora's offerings --- Not bad. Still, Pandora is not for serious classical music fans because they only play individual tracks, not complete compositions. A Mahler symphony or a Beethoven string quartet is meant to be digested completely, not in little sips. A curse on the lawyers and executives that force this desecration of art.

While I'm cursing, a pox on the Chumby developers, too. When I'm finished reading at night I like to set the Chumby timer to turn off the music. Clearly no one would ever want to listen for more than 60 minutes! What a silly limitation. Then, when I try to turn the timer on I press and press and press and curse and curse because it just ignores my touch. If I'm lucky I can set it after 5 touches, though sometimes it's many more. I don't know if it's the hardware touch-screen or the software, but most other Chumby features seem to work okay.

Happy holidays to everyone.