A few notes from the music world.

Marian Elliott-Said is recovering from breast cancer. WCD extends our best wishes to her.

By the way, Marian Elliott-Said is perhaps better known as “Poly Styrene”, front woman for the X-Ray Spex. After the jump, we’ll embed some X-Ray Spex video.

Meanwhile, Lady Gaga claims her new perfume smells “like an expensive hooker”. If someone told her this was an effective advertising strategy, they were wrong.

And something a bit more pleasant to think about than Poly Styrene and Lady Gaga: the NYT has a longish piece about the Internet Music Score Library Project and some of the copyright issues experienced by the site.

The Borromeo String Quartet plays from laptops with downloaded scores instead of sheet music. The digital music library is one of its major sources.

We wonder if the growth of the iPad and other tablet devices is going to result in more groups replacing sheet music with electronic devices. Not that we’re music experts – we tend to rely on other people (ahem) for that – but we can see some possible advantages to going all tablet, all the time.

Here’s the video we promised of what we think is X-Ray Spex best song…

4 Responses to “A few notes from the music world.”

  1. sween says:

    IMSLP has been my major, i.e., only, source for the scores I’ve put on my iPad. Over 3GB so far not including the scores downloaded directly on the iPad.

    My application of choice, For Score, is definitely intended to be used as a replacement for sheet music. For someone playing a single part, it probably works consistently well, but for full scores, it is often too slow turning the page to be useful. Its probably a combination of the file size, available memory and processor speed, but it doesn’t dissuade me from using it as a score reader.

    There are at least three competing applications as well. Maybe more at this point, as I haven’t looked in more than six months.

    IMSLP notes the account of each person who uploads a score. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Sibley Library of Eastman and the Loeb Library of Harvard are participating, or have at some point.

  2. I don’t know. “Smells like an expensive hooker” is probably a good marketing hook if you want to snare the Elliot Spitzer dollar.

    Also, in an age when Jersey Shore is a smash hit, it becomes very difficult to dismiss something as “too tacky” to succeed…

  3. stainles says:

    Sween:

    Thanks for the first-hand report. That’s exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I would be interested in seeing if there’s a noticeable performance difference with For Score if/when the newer iPads hit the streets.

    Do you have any thoughts on the copyright issues outlined in the NYT article?

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