When Stravisky's The Rite of Spring premiered in 1913, the reaction from the crowd (according to many accounts) was one of astonishment and shock, resulting in a full scale riot. Now that's passion!

And passion is what defines great music, and the artists who create it. Great artists have no choice; they must create the music, not matter what the obstacles are. Not all artists, of course, are of the caliber of Stravisnsky's talents, but they may have some of the same passion, and become an unstoppable force. In our American culture, we differentiate between high and low art; the high artists get grants to write symphonies, and the low artists are considered "garage bands." Of course some of our greatest and most endearing music springs from garages, and sometimes the great concert halls feature music that nobody remembers.

One measure of great art is the amount of controversy it causes. The world in which The Rite of Spring emerged probably wasn't quite ready for what was considered at the time primitive (i.e. sexual) and marching to a different drummer than the late romnatic period that preceded it. But times don't change, and in 1969 the world wasn't quite ready for the ultimate garage/art band, and certainly one of the more, uh, distinctive groups of all times, The Shaggs! Read more »

 Imagine my surprise when I saw this construction sign: 

 All was well, though; I had 100 pounds of ice, a case of rum, and plenty of limes and sugar.

Well, duh:

If you're excited about 3D, but aren't excited about waiting for television standards to be figured out, take a look at the Swell 3D collection of anaglyphs. This is an 80 year old technology that requires only a pair of inexpensive red/cyan cardboard glasses (and they'll even send you a free pair).

Gotta love the old-time cheesecake shots! The rest of the site is quite engaging too; they are up on all the current developments in this creative medium. I'm especially intrigued by their cool Flash animations. Read more »

I did the annual maintenance on my Hammond Organ over Thanksgiving, reminding me of what an incredibly cool instrument it is. I think it represents the highest evolution of one part of the tree of musical instruments.

For one thing, it was not ever considered to be an electronic instrument by its manufacturer. They always referred to it as an "electric organ." Why? Because the sounds, although amplified and processed by various analog circuits, was actually produced mechanically. Laurens Hammond was a successful inventor and tinkerer. He had developed the first synchronus electric clock in the 1920s, which used the steady frequency of the electric power system to ensure high accuracy. When the Depression hit, the demand for clocks dropped, so he was trying to think of other ways to use his motors. He remembered that a lot of churches couldn't afford an organ, and the crude electric and electronic models of the time had lots of problems, the most pressing one was how they couldn't stay in tune. He developed a system of rotating tonewheels, little wheels that passed through a magnetic field to create sine waves. There are 96 of these, with their rotation controlled by a series of gears, and running off one of his synchronous motors. Nothing to ever go out of tune!

The next trick was a way to combine these to create pleasing tones. By mixing the various harmonics of a tone through a series of drawbars (linear volume controls), very rich sounds can be created. This was the first successful additive synthesizer, way back in 1934!

A criticism of many electronic instruments is that their tone is too regular, making it dull. Since this is a mechanical system, very slight and subtle variations of the tones are created as the wheels go in and out of phase. Many early instruments used a master high octave, and dividers to create the lower octaves. When mixed together, they were always perfectly in phase, giving a lifeless sound. Not the Hammond Organ; the pricipal tones and harmonics all come from separate tonewheels. Read more »