At an awards ceremony in Washington D.C. on Sunday April 25th, The Journal of Music was announced as the winner of the 2010 Utne Independent Press Award for Arts Coverage. The Utne awards, now in their twenty-first year, survey over 1,300 independent magazines from all around the world.
Author Archives: Admin
A Model Business
The search for a sustainable business model for the producing and selling of music in the digital age persists, but it is crippled by a narrow view of the internet. Presenting this technology as either a threat to income, due to its ability to copy content easily, or an opportunity for generating income, due to its instant connectivity to so many, means other key aspects of its influence on the business of money are neglected.
Midem 2010
Cannes – The teenagers employed to demonstrate the joys of Rockband – complete with full stage, bass and lead guitars, mics and kit – must have been wondering why the game was suddenly becoming such hard work. Situated by the café area at Midem – the annual music fair that has attracted artists, labels, music publishers and managers from all over the world since 1967 – surely some of them would take take time out from intense meetings to knock out ‘Message in a Bottle’ or ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. The Journal of Music spotted the occasional enthusiastic Continue reading
Fidil
In a live broadcast from the Oireachtas festival in Co. Donegal last year, following a brief, jocular interview with the television host, fiddle-player Ciarán Ó Maonaigh seemed to step into a different personality. Standing four-square on front of the camera, eyes wide open and fixed on his fingers, bow pressing unconventionally hard against the strings, he presented a robust, almost aggressive treatment of a selection of reels. The performance Continue reading
The Songs We Don’t Sing
I have been watching, in amazement, the cartoon Wonder Pets on the Nickelodeon children’s television channel.
Demonstrating the benefits of teamwork, Linny the guinea pig, Tuck the turtle, and Ming-Ming the duckling (Ming-Ming is everyone’s favorite, and mine, too) save an animal in trouble—sometimes a dolphin, sometimes a monkey, sometimes a bee—in every episode, and feats of great collaboration are always required.
Our Technological Land of Oz
For nine years, I have been poised as a magazine publisher, ready to leap into the virtual world entirely. From about 2006, I was expecting it every month. It has yet to happen. Earlier this year I witnessed another magazine, not unlike ours – one that I regularly flicked through – go online and I stopped reading it entirely. No one will find Continue reading
The Most Mod Con
At a certain point in the 1980s, in the BBC Four television programme Electric Dreams, the piano in the front room disappeared. No explanation. No comment. Some people may find that hard to accept. I know I do.
The series, broadcast in autumn, explored how technological developments transformed British homes in the Continue reading
Chain of Envy
In the New Music Connoisseur in May, the centenarian US composer Elliott Carter, commenting on why his music is better known in England than his homeland, said: ‘…contemporary music is very much more accepted in England than it is here, in general for many different reasons, but one of them is that it’s just been played more and Continue reading
Music Network Tour: Ragnhild Furebotten and Tore Bruvoll’s “Hekla Stålstrenga”
‘There’s just a little ocean between us. I think there’s more that connects us than not,’ suggests Tore Bruvoll, guitarist, composer, arranger, and one half of the duo behind the group Hekla Stålstrenga (which means ‘crochet-work steel-strings’). Bruvoll is referring to the relationship between Norwegian and Irish traditional music, and listening to the myriad of musical projects that Bruvoll and Ragnhild Furebotten – fiddle-player and co-founder of Continue reading
The Basque Irish Connection: Niamh Ní Charra/Ibon Koteron/Gavin Ralston
What does it take to connect with the music of another culture? At the tail end of a decade that has enthralled us with the ease with which we can now connect with the world, it would be natural to presume that connecting with another music culture has become rather straightforward. A click or two, a website or three, and suddenly we are Continue reading
Toner Quinn 