Quantum Cello

Radiolab is my favorite show. They do 5 episodes per year, but in the off-time, they do shorter interest pieces, including this one, about a musician who plays the cello by looping and layering through a computer. It's really beautiful and creative stuff, and interesting to hear her talk about her stage fright as part of the reason she does this.

And the music is gorgeous. You can download the episode by clicking here, or find more information at Radiolab's website.

Bohemian Astrophysics

Gotta love this. Queen's guitarist, Brian May, has just finished his doctoral thesis in Astrophysics after taking 30 years off to "play some guitar.

Boston and Journey

Maybe I'm behind in hearing about this. The bands Boston and Journey both have new lead singers, and both of them were discovered through MySpace and YouTube. It's a completely new paradigm! Here are the stories.

Tommy DeCarlo with Boston



And here's Arnel Pineda with Journey



I'm not sure how I feel about the emphasis on sounding exactly like the original singers. Musically, it seems like we're labeling everything now. But these guys are pretty amazing technical singers, and it does show that we're living under an entirely different set of rules these days.

From Juba to Hoofin' and Beyond

One of the primary projects I'm working on this summer is revamping my classes. British Literature is no longer offered, and so I'm teaching semester-long courses in the Hebrew Bible, World Mythology, and Literary Nonfiction. I taught the Bible and Myth courses once 2 years ago, but the Nonfiction course is entirely new. Allen Chamberlain and I received an innovation grant to work on the course this summer, and I've been having a pretty amazing time with it. The course will deal with both written and audio nonfiction, and the preliminary ideas are on a wiki I'm developing over the summer, which will eventually become a platform for the whole class to work in.

Today, I was reading one of the essays in our textbook, and got really excited about a possible project that I may work on while the students work on their own individual projects. The essay mentioned Juba dancing, and since I didn't know what that was, I looked it up. It's a form of dance that slaves did on plantations when slave owners outlawed any musical instruments, thinking music would cause unrest and riots among the slaves. In 1848, "Master Juba" (William Henry Lane) was taken to London by P.T. Barnum to dance before Queen Victoria. While he was there, he combined Juba dancing with traditional Irish dancing to create tap dance. Reading this reminded me of one of the most astonishing Broadway shows I've ever seen - Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk - starring Savion Glover. The rest of the brainstorm - and several videos - are on the wiki, which you can check out here. It's still in rough form, but I think the videos are sufficiently amazing to justify the incompleteness of the thought process.

But just in case you don't know Savion Glover, here's a 2 minute video that ought to inspire you to look at the rest of it. But if you have time for nothing else, watch the video of him and his group (Not Your Ordinary Tappers) at the White House, which is the 2nd from last on the page.