• Photos
  • Bio
  • Contact Ian

Ian Sidden

Subscribe

  • Email
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Craft
  • My News
  • About the Music
  • The Rest of Life

Goodies

November 30, 2017 By Ian Sidden

A few articles that have caught my attention this week:

Don’t Be Batman:

What this study offers is a solution that is more damning than the “problem” that it addresses. If a four-year-old child has to disassociate, to pretend that she is someone else, in order to cope with the demands of your program, your program needs to stop, today.

There is a fine line between acoustic excellence and elitism:

Despite decades of compromised sound classical music survives very well in London because music is remarkably resilient. The brain’s miraculous psychoacoustic compensation abilities mean that some of the content can be stripped out without destroying the music’s essence – MP3 and other lossy formats depend on this. Sonic excellence is a laudable goal. But classical music can and will survive despite compromised concert halls and compromised audio systems. Like Class A audio systems, acoustically perfect concert halls and are a ‘very nice to have’ but not a ‘must have’.

Notable recordings of 2017 (preliminary):

I have begun compiling my end-of-year list of notable performances and recordings.

PRO-NEUTRALITY, ANTI-TITLE II:

This argument certainly applies to net neutrality in a far more profound way: the Internet has been the single most important driver of not just economic growth but overall consumer welfare for the last two decades. Given that all of that dynamism has been achieved with minimal regulatory oversight, the default position of anyone concerned about future growth should be maintaining a light touch. After all, regulation always has a cost far greater than what we can see at the moment it is enacted, and given the importance of the Internet, those costs are massively more consequential than restaurants or just about anything else.

Filed Under: The Rest of Life Tagged With: linked

Classical Music for Elevators

July 6, 2015 By Ian Sidden

Kirk McElhearn writing on Kirkville:

I know Apple Music is just getting started, but they can certainly do better than just provide “Classical Music for Elevators.” Maybe Apple needs to hire some classical music “curators.”

I actually haven’t even received a single classical music playlist suggestion under the “For You” tab. So he’s ahead of me in this metric. It’s been all popular music like rap and classical rock even though I “love” (click or tap the little heart icon) many of the classical tracks I do find. I do get album suggestions.

They do have curators, but for some reason, the myriad playlists offered don’t actually make it to the “For You” section. Except for the elevator music one apparently.

Filed Under: Linked Tagged With: apple music, linked, playlists

About Ian

Ian Sidden is currently a baritone member of the Theater Dortmund Opera chorus. Read More…

Latest Posts

Premiere: Fernand Cortez

Tonight we premiere our production of Gaspare Spontini’s Fernand Cortez, ou La conquête du Mexique at Opernhaus Dortmund. This is after a two year delay; originally we were to have premiered this in 2020, but history intervened. There are many versions of this opera floating around, and we are doing a version that has – […]

Premiere: Frédégonde

Here’s one I’ve been looking forward to for awhile. Tonight at Opernhaus Dortmund, we’re premiering Frédegonde for the first time in Germany. It’s a work inspired from the early history of the Merovingians in what is now France and the ongoing feud between two of the queens, Brunhild and Frédegonde. The work was composed by […]

“Ständchen” by Schubert, Guitar and Voice Arrangement

Here is a performance of my self accompanied guitar arrangement of Franz Schubert’s “Ständchen”.

PREMIERE: Tosca

Tonight at Opernhaus Dortmund, we’re premiering our “Tosca”, which is the first premiere including the chorus since March 13, 2020.

A chart showing the seven day average new cases in Dortmund

One Year Later

On March 13, 2020, we had our last large premiere at Theater Dortmund with the chorus onstage. We performed “Die Stumme von Portici” to a nearly empty auditorium, a so-called Geisterpremiere. We nevertheless, of course, gave it our all. There have been other premieres since then as the lockdowns have come and gone, but so […]

Copyright © 2022 · WordPress