Strange but interesting...

...musical scores and notation.

Some of it's just art, using musical notes for abstract decoration. But I'm more interested in those that are innovative uses of notation that actually mean something as music--Sylvano Bussotti's "Pour Clavier" (1961) or John Stead's "Play II" for harpsichord and synthesizer (although I'm not sure if it's really writing music). There's also "World Beat Music," which cleverly uses actual notation to draw a map of the world. Pretty neat, but I wonder if it actually sounds pretty. In college, we performed the world premier of a piece called "Pyramids." The conductor's score drew out a pyramid at one point. It didn't sound like much.

Jimmy Hendrix was a conservative

Who knew? Well, apparently the biographers cited here did.

Experimental Beatles' "music"

Paul McCartney wants to release a long-hidden experimental piece the Beatles recorded for an electronic music festival--a piece long thought mythical by fans. According to his description,

"I said all I want you to do is just wander around all the stuff, bang it, shout, play it, it doesn't need to make any sense," McCartney told the program.

"Hit a drum then wander on to the piano, hit a few notes, just wander around. So that's what we did and then put a bit of an echo on it. It's very free."

Not to disparage him personally, but this surprises me. I'm no fan of modern, abstract art, nor of its musical equivalents. But I'm able to understand that in the pieces regarded as "good" by the critics, there is still some planning and intelligence behind the pattern, even if it's deliberately obscure or ugly. So I'm surprised that in the Beatles' case, there wasn't any thought behind it--the sounds were intentionally random.

Well, maybe that's why the other band members vetoed the idea of releasing it earlier. Still, I hope he's able to get it out; I'm sure some of their fans would like to hear it, even if just for the novelty.