Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Some Yo-Yo Ma and More: Free Classical Music Podcasts

in Music | March 5th, 2008

mozartipod.gifWith the recent 250th anniver­sary of Mozart’s birth, there has been no short­age of pod­casts ded­i­cat­ed to Mozart’s mas­ter­pieces. First, Radio Swe­den (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) reis­sued a dig­i­tal archive of Mozart record­ings by the Roy­al Swedish Opera from the 1940s and 1950s. And, along very sim­i­lar lines, Dan­marks Radio (Feed — Web Site) issued pod­casts of nine Mozart sym­phonies record­ed by the Dan­ish Radio Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra. (You’ll find here sym­phonies num­bers 15, 17, 23, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, and 41. Since the web site is in Dan­ish, we’d rec­om­mend access­ing these high qual­i­ty MP3’s through the rss feed list­ed above.) Last­ly, we should men­tion here that, as part of last year’s fes­tiv­i­ties, The Inter­na­tion­al Mozart Foun­da­tion pub­lished online for the first time the entire­ty of of Mozart’s musi­cal scores.

Along with Mozart, you can find plen­ty of Beethoven. We have high­light­ed here before, but it’s worth not­ing again, Deutsche Welle’s pod­cast col­lec­tion called Beethoven­fest (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). You’ll want to give it a look, and also see the pod­cast col­lec­tion put togeth­er by the Boston Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra Con­ser­va­to­ry (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). This edu­ca­tion­al series offers an exten­sive overview and record­ings of Beethoven’s work, as well as that of Arnold Schoen­berg. You can also catch more Beethoven (as well as a lit­tle Mozart and Bach) with the pod­cast series called The Con­cert (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), which fea­tures record­ings from the Isabel­la Stew­art Gard­ner Muse­um in Boston.

Speak­ing of Bach, you may want to give some time to these two pod­casts: Bach Pod­cast from Magnatune.com (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) and Bach Fes­ti­val of Philadel­phia (Feed — Web Site).

Let’s now leave you with a few oth­er good finds: Wag­n­er Operas Pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) lets you lis­ten in on record­ings from the annu­al Bayreuth Fes­ti­val, plus more. An Inti­mate Tour Through the Music of Yo-Yo Ma (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) offers essen­tial­ly what the title says. Final­ly, we’d rec­om­mend Clas­si­cal Per­for­mance (iTunes Feed Web Site), which con­sists of clas­si­cal music per­for­mances from WGB­H’s Stu­dio One in Boston; The New York Phi­la­har­mon­ic Pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) which intro­duces you to the music and per­form­ers fea­tured in the con­certs of the New York Phil­har­mon­ic; and From the Top. Live from Carnegie Hall Video Pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), a pod­cast that show­cas­es the top-notch skills and com­pelling sto­ries of Amer­i­ca’s best young clas­si­cal musi­cians.

Sub­scribe to Our Feed

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Eat, Pray, Love @ Google

in Books | March 4th, 2008

Eliz­a­beth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love has been on the New York Times best­seller list for 57 weeks. If you haven’t read it yet, then you may want to spend some time with Gilbert’s talk at Google. While her talk and read­ing did­n’t com­plete­ly strike a chord with me, it may well with you. So here you go (and, yes, we’ve added the video to our YouTube Playlist):

Sub­scribe to Our Feed

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos

in Science | March 4th, 2008

Cour­tesy of Wired’s Blog, here are 10 videos dis­play­ing some rather cool chem­istry exper­i­ments at work. Below, we’ve post­ed one video that will let you answer a ques­tion that you’ve almost cer­tain­ly pon­dered for ages — can liq­uid nitro­gen neu­tral­ize molten iron? (For more videos along these lines, check out this site.)

Sub­scribe to Our Feed

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The iPhone and the 21st Century University

in Apple | March 4th, 2008

iphone2.jpgNext fall, all new fresh­men attend­ing ACU (Abi­lene Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty) will receive an iPhone (or iPod Touch) when they get to cam­pus. And, from there, the Apple gad­get will fig­ure cen­tral­ly to stu­dents’ cam­pus expe­ri­ence. The iPhone is the lat­est and great­est “con­verged mobile media device,” which com­bines in one gad­get numer­ous func­tion­al­i­ties — inter­net and email access, phone, audio, video, and maps. And once you put a gen­er­a­tion of stu­dents reared on mobile devices on this com­mon plat­form, new ways of run­ning the uni­ver­si­ty in the 21st cen­tu­ry start to open up.

The changes begin with the way uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tion gets done. ACU envi­sions stu­dents using their devices to check their meal and account bal­ances, access course cal­en­dars, receive news and spe­cial bul­letins from the uni­ver­si­ty, and tap into the uni­ver­si­ty phone/employee direc­to­ry. Not far down the line, the uni­ver­si­ty antic­i­pates that the iPhone will ful­fill cer­tain reg­is­trar func­tions — mean­ing that stu­dents can use their iPhone to scope out, and even enroll in, var­i­ous class­es. Then, they’ll add some e‑commerce to the mix and let stu­dents use their mobile device to con­duct com­merce with the book­store and uni­ver­si­ty restau­rants. Are you start­ing to get the pic­ture? The iPhone becomes a “one stop shop for infor­ma­tion and ser­vices” that can be accessed on the fly.

But what hap­pens in the class­room? I had a chance to catch up with Bill Rankin, the Direc­tor of Mobile Learn­ing Research (and also Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor & Direc­tor of Eng­lish Grad­u­ate Stud­ies) who shared some of ACU’s think­ing about how the iPhone cre­ates new teach­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. For starters, the device will allow stu­dents to access syl­labi, course doc­u­ments (cre­at­ed with Google Docs), home­work assign­ments and pod­casts that com­ple­ment the course. (Imag­ine stu­dents down­load­ing pod­cast­ed lec­tures from pre­vi­ous class­es, or lis­ten­ing to clips of Mozart in their music appre­ci­a­tion class, or review­ing bits of French dia­logue in the French 101 class.) From here, the ped­a­gog­i­cal uses of the iPhone start to deep­en. Accord­ing to Rankin, the Apple gad­get will give teach­ers the abil­i­ty to con­duct real-time sur­veys that gauge stu­dent per­cep­tions of the class (are they under­stand­ing the course? is it mov­ing too quick­ly?) and use the feed­back to make the class­es “more care­ful­ly tai­lored to the inter­ests and abil­i­ties.” It’s also an added perk that the iPhone will let stu­dents con­tribute to the class through their online per­sona, which, research shows, “embold­ens stu­dents [par­tic­u­lar­ly shy ones] who might not oth­er­wise share their ideas.” Then there’s this sce­nario (and oth­ers like it): With the iPhone, the “biol­o­gy class in the field will be able to pho­to­graph spec­i­mens, post their find­ings to oth­er class­es not cur­rent­ly in the field, com­mu­ni­cate with experts, and use the web to iden­ti­fy and research spec­i­mens. That’s trans­for­ma­tion­al, and we think it will offer dis­tinct advan­tages to our stu­dents.” Last­ly, the iPhone opens up the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cre­at­ing “hybrid” cours­es, which means cours­es con­duct­ed part­ly in the class­room and part­ly online. For more on the hybrid con­cept (and oth­er facets of the project), you can watch the video post­ed on YouTube that intro­duces ACU’s iPhone ini­tia­tive. We’ve post­ed Part 1 below, and you can access Part 2 here. To get more insight into ACU’s intel­li­gent think­ing about the poten­tial edu­ca­tion­al appli­ca­tions of the iPhone, you should spend some time on their “Con­nect­ed” web site.

Sub­scribe to Our Feed

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A New Media Scholar’s Dilemma

in Literature, Media, MIT | March 2nd, 2008

For a grad­u­ate stu­dent in an Eng­lish Ph.D. pro­gram, one of the big mile­stones on the road to the dis­ser­ta­tion is the Oral Exam. In my case this involves five pro­fes­sors, a list of 60–80 books, and two hours in a (rhetor­i­cal­ly) smoke-filled room. Since I’m work­ing on con­tem­po­rary lit­er­a­ture and new media, one of the chal­lenges I have to deal with is how to address nov­els, films, tele­vi­sion shows, video games and more as part of the same “list.” How does one put these things togeth­er? How can a video game be read as a text along­side Gravity’s Rain­bow or Brave New World?

One way to approach this ques­tion is to include the work of lit­er­ary and cul­tur­al crit­ics who are already look­ing at new and tra­di­tion­al media side by side. Fol­low­ing that line, I try to keep up with the aca­d­e­m­ic blog Grand Text Auto, which cov­ers “com­put­er nar­ra­tive, games, poet­ry and art.” One of its con­trib­u­tors, Noah Wardrip-Fru­in, is work­ing on a book about dig­i­tal fic­tions and com­put­er games that looks per­fect for my Orals list—and he’s pub­lish­ing it, chap­ter by chap­ter, on Grand Text Auto for blog-based peer review. It will come out next year with MIT Press, but for now, it’s a work in progress.

All fine so far—I could list it as “forth­com­ing” and direct my pro­fes­sors to the link. But what hap­pens when I start com­ment­ing on this book as I read it? What are we to do with the knowl­edge that this “text” will most like­ly change between now and next year? Does this item on my Orals list sig­ni­fy a draft of the book, the blog and its com­ments, or the expe­ri­ence of read­ing and writ­ing into the MS myself (includ­ing, per­haps, respons­es from the author)?

I find the dilem­ma par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing because it touch­es on a cen­tral con­flict in human­i­ties schol­ar­ship. Are we pas­sive observers of the lit­er­ary scene or active par­tic­i­pants in it? It’s a rare aca­d­e­m­ic crit­ic who thinks of call­ing up a poet to ask her what she meant in a par­tic­u­lar line, but that’s exact­ly the kind of con­nec­tion that our hyper-con­scious, dig­i­tal­ly medi­at­ed world offers up.

P.S. After all of this hand-wring­ing, it’s obvi­ous I’m not going to have time to read Noah’s book before I take my exam, so it’s off the list. But I can’t wait to dig in next month!

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods — Free Digital Copy

in Books | March 2nd, 2008

Harper­Collins has rolled out anoth­er free book — the New York Times best­seller Amer­i­can Gods by Neil Gaiman. You can read it for free here (or buy it here). For more free books by Harper­Collins, see our post from last week. And, as always, don’t for­get to see our col­lec­tion of free audio­books.

Sub­scribe to Our Feed

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

When You Google “Open Culture”

in Uncategorized | March 2nd, 2008

Just a quick note: If you Google “Open Cul­ture,” you’ll now find that Google has placed “sub-links” beneath the main search results, and these sub-links give you access to some of our most pop­u­lar pages. (See real-time search results here.) If you’re look­ing for free audio­books, online cours­es and for­eign lan­guage lessons (just to give a few exam­ples), then this is one quick way to access them.

searchresultsscreenshot.jpg

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Physics for Future Presidents

in Online Courses, UC Berkeley | March 1st, 2008

Just a quick fyi that we’ve added a pop­u­lar UC Berke­ley course, Physics for Future Pres­i­dents, to our col­lec­tion: Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties. You can down­load the com­plete course to your MP3 play­er. Just scroll down the page and look under “Physics.”

If you’d rather expe­ri­ence this course in video, you can watch the course on YouTube. I’ve post­ed the first lec­ture below, and you can find the rest of the lec­tures here.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.