STUFF
Date:	12/12/2006 9:59:32 PM Eastern Standard Time
From:	FarnumA440
To:	AnalogMan1, Concertd@optonline.net, FarnumA440, pianoman051@msn.com, APuntel@gmail.com, DC300AMP

 

The Torq Vinyl Producer Contest
audioBase.com, in association with M-Audio, has announced the Torq Vinyl Producer Contest. Download free loops, create a jammin' track, and if your track is the best one audioBase.com's Techno Leaders label will release it on vinyl! The grand prize winner will also receive a Torq Conectiv DJ audio interface from M-Audio, as well as free downloads of the entire audioBase.com library and free tutorial program downloads from macProVideo.com. This contest ends on December 31, 2006.

Remix Hotel TV
Nine videos from Remix Hotel LA are up at www.remixhotel.com. Watch exclusive product demos, panels, and artist interviews! Learn about Galbanum MetaSynth 4, the Roland SH-201, the Novation Remote SL controller, M-Audio Torq DJ software, how drum 'n' bass producer Photek makes his beats, and more!

Music Video Contest
Music Nation has launched the beta version of its Web site where entries are now being accepted for its multigenre online video music competition. Rock, pop, and urban genre contestants can upload videos to compete for a global recording contract with Epic Records. MORE.

The Listen Exhibition
The Listen Exhibition will be at San Francisco's Exploratorium from now until December 31, 2007. "Listen: Making Sense of Sound" is a new 5000-square-foot Exploratorium exhibition that invites you to experience the nature of sound, the ways in which humans perceive sound, and, most importantly, how you listen. You can even listen at home via the Web at www.exploratorium.edu/listen.

Software Exploited by Pirates Goes to Work for Hollywood 

By BRAD STONE
Published: February 25, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 25 — Hollywood studios are going into business with one of their biggest tormentors: the peer-to-peer pioneer BitTorrent.

On Monday, the company, whose technology unleashed a wave of illegal file-sharing on the Internet, plans to unveil the BitTorrent Entertainment Network on its Web site, BitTorrent.com. The digital media store will offer around 3,000 new and classic movies and thousands more television shows, as well as a thousand PC games and music videos each, all legally available for purchase.

The programming comes from studios, including Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount and Warner Brothers, that previously announced their intention to work with BitTorrent. There is also a new partner: the 83-year-old Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which will take part by making 100 films available on the site from its 4,000-movie library. "Somebody once said you have to embrace your enemy,” said Doug Lee, executive vice president of MGM’s new-media division. “We like the idea that they have millions of users worldwide. That is potentially fertile, legitimate ground for us.”

The BitTorrent store will work slightly differently than rival digital media offerings like the iTunes Store of Apple and the Xbox Live service of Microsoft. BitTorrent will commingle free downloads of users’ own video uploads with sales of professional fare. And while it will sell digital copies of shows like “24” and “Bones” for $1.99 an episode, it will only rent movies. Once the films are on the PC, they expire within 30 days of their purchase or 24 hours after the buyer begins to watch them.

New releases like “Superman Returns” cost $3.99, while classics like “Reservoir Dogs” cost $2.99. The studio’s content plays in Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 11. It is secured by Microsoft’s antipiracy software, which blocks users from watching rented movies on more than one PC or sending them to others over the Internet.

Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said the company had secured the right to permit users to buy outright digital copies of films, but the studios wanted to charge prices that would be too high for most consumers. “We don’t think the current prices are a smart thing to show any user,” he said. “We want to allocate services with very digestible price points.”

BitTorrent, which is based in San Francisco and has 45 employees, will face significant challenges as it tries to carve out some space in the emerging digital downloading landscape. Apple is the largest presence among the legitimate Internet media stores. ITunes, which has sold more than a billion dollars worth of digital music, sells movies from Walt Disney and Paramount and programs from all the major TV networks.

Other entrants in the nascent field include Walmart.com, MovieLink.com (owned by four of the studios) and Amazon Unbox, which recently announced a way for TiVo users to download movies to their television instead of watching them on smaller PC screens.

Michael McGuire, a vice president at the research firm Gartner, said BitTorrent and its rivals all face the same challenge: “They must get consumers to look at this as a better and more reliable way to watch a movie than renting a DVD.”

There is also the illegal economy in pirated video content, whose size dwarfs that of the legal online media stores. The Motion Picture Association of America has said that a million movies are illegally acquired every day using BitTorrent technology. The software is open source, so versions of it, as well as Web sites offering pirated movies, are maintained by companies not affiliated with BitTorrent.

Bram Cohen, BitTorrent’s co-founder and chief executive and the inventor of the technology, said the new store would offer a compelling alternative to the illegal ecosystem. “I think what consumers want is a good experience,” he said, “and the first part of that is making the content they want available legitimately.”

But he added that the antipiracy software that will protect files in the new store, which the studios insist on including, will make the experience more cumbersome for users. “We are not happy with the user interface implications” of digital rights management, or D.R.M., Mr. Cohen said. “It’s an unfortunate thing. We would really like to strip it all away.”

BitTorrent’s store will have some advantages over legal rivals’. Its peer-to-peer technology introduced by Mr. Cohen in 2001 works by taking pieces of large files from nearby computer users who have that file, permitting speedy downloads.

In a test of the new BitTorrent store, downloading the film “X-Men 3” took two hours with a broadband Internet connection. Downloading the same movie from Walmart.com took three hours. And BitTorrent downloads should theoretically become faster as more people sign up, since digital copies will originate from nearby computers whose owners have bought the movie, instead of from a central server.

The company, which has received close to $30 million in venture capital, ultimately wants to use its media store to demonstrate how the underlying technology is effective at moving large files around the Internet. The it wants to sell the technology to other media stores and to the studios themselves.

The studios hope the new BitTorrent will put a dent in the illegal trading of their content. Thomas Lesinski, president of Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment, said he hoped the store would win over young people accustomed to free fare. “We look at this as a first step in the peer-to-peer world, to try to steer people toward legitimate content,” he said.

BitTorrent executives say they are not able to prevent illegal downloads in the larger file-sharing world. But they cite internal studies that say 34 percent of BitTorrent users would pay for content if a comprehensive, legal service was available.

That group clearly does not include Aaron, a 36-year-old San Francisco programmer who does not want his full name used because he and his wife regularly use BitTorrent to download songs, movies and TV shows illegally.

After testing a prelaunch version of the legal BitTorrent store, he said it would not persuade him to abandon the limitless selection of content and freedom he enjoys on free BitTorrent sites.

“The sad thing is, it’s not about the money,” he said. “I’m not interested in renting a movie. I want to own it. I want total portability. I want to give a copy to my brother. Digital convergence is supposed to make things like this easier, but D.R.M. is making them harder.”

Cat Lovers Lining Up for No-Sneeze Kitties

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: October 6, 2006
A small California biotech company says it is ready to deliver the Holy Grail of the $35 billion pet industry: a hypoallergenic cat.

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Julie Chytrowsky
Two cats with a mutant gene that produces a modified protein far less likely to induce allergies.




At the start of next year, the first kittens — which the company calls “lifestyle pets” — will go home to eager owners who have been carefully screened and have been on a waiting list for more than two years.

Since it announced the project in October 2004, the company, Allerca, of San Diego, says it has received inquiries from people in 85 countries seeking to buy a cat bred so that its glands do not produce the protein responsible for most human cat allergies.

Cats ordered now will take 12 to 15 months for delivery in the United States, 15 to 18 months in Europe. Cost: $4,000. And owners must pass Allerca’s finicky screening tests.

Prospective buyers are interviewed for motivation and warmth, approved as if they were adopting a child. Will they punish if kitty has an accident on the floor or scratches the furniture? Their families and their homes — from carpets to curtains — must also be evaluated for allergies and allergens.

“You’re not just buying a cat; it’s a medical device that replaces shots and pills,” said Megan Young, chief executive of Allerca. “At the same time, this is a living animal, so the well-being of our product comes before our customers. This is not some high-priced handbag that you put back on the shelf if it doesn’t match.”

In the United States and Europe, cats are the most common household pet — there are an estimated 30 million in this country alone — and cat allergies are one of most common human allergies. That combination has made many homes cauldrons of sneezing, itchy conflicts in which a fiancé is allergic to his beloved’s favorite pet, or a mother-in-law cannot come for a festive meal because of Fluffy’s presence.

With cat owners sometimes paying thousands of dollars each year for allergy shots, antihistamines and air filters to damp down allergies, $4,000 for a sneeze-free existence may be an acceptable price tag. More research is needed, but preliminary independent studies suggest Allerca cats do not provoke allergies.

“As strange as it may sound, for us the price would have been worth it — it would have saved us money, and saved us pain from all the medical and also emotional problems,” said Christopher Cullen of New York. His girlfriend’s worsening allergies resulted this week in their putting up for adoption their beloved cat, Cimbi, who had achieved “mild Internet notoriety,” Mr. Cullen said, as the star of her own Web site, harlemfur.com.

Mr. Cullen and his girlfriend, Cheryl Burley, have fought a losing two-year battle to engineer a tolerable co-existence with Cimbi, because Ms. Burley, a devoted cat lover, has had cat allergies since childhood. On the Web site, you can watch Mr. Cullen, who works for the New York Senate Democratic Conference, giving Cimbi a bath to reduce her allergen load; he takes Cimbi on a leash to Morningside Park for a day, to give his girlfriend’s allergies a break.

The couple never put down carpets. They installed HEPA filters and vacuumed incessantly. But Ms. Burley’s symptoms worsened in recent months and that fragile equilibrium fell apart two weeks ago when the couple took in a second cat, Marley. Ms. Burley could not work, could not breathe and had a seizure. They took Marley to an animal shelter.

“Our whole life has gone downhill,” Ms. Burley said. “I missed four days of work. I’m back on inhalers, eyedrops and creams. This hypoallergenic cat would be a perfect solution for me. I’m determined to have a kitty.”

Dr. Sheldon Spector, a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently studied the cats and said the concept seemed to work.

Ten volunteers with severe cat allergies were exposed to a variety of cats but showed no reaction to the Allerca cats, though all had symptoms with normal animals. “This is not a definitive study, but it is an interesting and intriguing concept that could really help people,” Dr. Spector said.

For the moment, he said he would not recommend buying the cats because “$4,000 seems like a lot of money” and there was still the chance that some people might react to some degree to less common cat proteins.

Most human cat allergies are caused by Fel d 1, a molecule that has been sequenced and its gene mapped in the last decade. At first, Allerca scientists sought a method to delete or disable the gene.

But in testing to see whether the gene had been effectively silenced, they made a fortuitous discovery: A very small number of cats carry a mutant gene that produces a modified protein, far less likely to induce allergies.

At that point, the research shifted course. Allerca screened thousands of cats to identify a population with the modified gene and then set those cats to breeding. Because the mutant gene is dominant, the breeding cats could be mated with normal cats to produce hypoallergenic kittens. And no special licensing or government approvals were necessary.

So, for the past few months, Allerca’s small pool of hypoallergenic cats have been busy reproducing. Their breeding facility cannot be visited and “is at a secret undisclosed location,” said Ms. Young, Allerca’s chief executive.

At 10 to 12 weeks, every Allerca kitten is neutered before it is delivered. The company insists this is mainly to prevent feline overpopulation. But every Allerca cat carries the dominant hypoallergenic gene and, in theory, could produce copycat hypoallergenic kittens.

In tests, Allerca cats do not produce allergic reactions. But only a few of the cats have lived in private homes, and only for a few weeks.

Last month, an Allerca public relations consultant, Julie Chytrowsky, kept Joshua, an Allerca cat, for several weeks at her Los Angeles area apartment. Joshua had flown to California to “do some publicity.”

Ms. Chytrowsky, who says she is normally quite allergic, had no symptoms even though she allowed Joshua to sleep in her bed. “I fell in love with him,” she said. “He is a real stud — well, he is a stud, really.”

The company insists on an assiduous screening of all prospective owners and their families because the cats may still not be safe for people with the most severe forms of cat allergy, such as people who have been rushed to the hospital after anaphylactic reactions. They might react to even the modified protein.

A Food and Drug Administration allergy test kit arrives five weeks before each kitten and all family members must be tested. Another required test detects the presence of other allergens in the house through a collection system that clients must place on their vacuum.

“We don’t want you blaming our cats if the real issue is mold or ragweed,” Ms. Young said.

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2nd Misc. Articles/Links of Interest
___________________________________________________________________________ Subject: Help for All Animals   http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com To all my pet loving friends! Please tell all of your friends to tell all of their friends! The Animal Rescue Site is having trouble getting enough people to click on it daily to meet their quota of getting free food donated every day to abused and neglected animals. It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on "feed an animal in need" for free. This doesn't cost you a thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate food to abandoned/neglected animals in exchange for advertising. Here's the web site! Pass it along to all of the pet-loving people you know...       http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com  __________________________________________________________________________   Photos for | SongCatchers' Summer ChoirCamp 2003 |   www.HeavenlyLullabies.org Click here: Links to some of Katie Ulanov's Musician Friends www.weepwithkatie.com/contactNew.html from Katie Ulanov: great site: www.Petography.com See Ken Farnum's Foosball Pics on... (http://NYMetroFoosball.i8.com/photo.html) or click on... | Ken's NYMetroFoosball.i8.com FoosPics Page Period Music Grow Up. Period. Peter Lindgreen The British harpsichordist and conductor Trevor Pinnock, above right, with members of the European Brandenburg Ensemble, from left, Peter McCarthy, Jonathan Manson and Hannah McLaughlin. By MICHAEL WHITE Published: August 6, 2006 FORTY years ago there was not much of an issue about how you performed a Mozart symphony, a Bach cantata or a Handel oratorio. You played it the way Wilhelm Furtwängler, Thomas Beecham or Herbert von Karajan might have: with mid-19th-century ideas that had hardened into accepted norms and generally meant big symphonic forces, heavy textures, slow speeds and modern instruments. Skip to next paragraph Readers’ Opinions Forum: Classical Music Then came “early music,” also known as period performance. Early musicians researched period instruments, rediscovered forgotten composers, revived old performance practices and in effect declared war on the interventionist musical culture of the mid-19th century. They set out to make their case with fundamentalist fervor, espousing lighter forces, faster speeds and period instruments. And through the 1970’s and 80’s they mutiplied and gathered force. At the start they were largely dismissed as eccentrics, the musical equivalents of New Agers and Flat Earthists. The British conductor Neville Marriner, who championed the performance of early repertory with a relaxed sense of period style on modern instruments, called them “the open-toed-sandals and brown-bread set.” Early players on period instruments were often scorned as musicological types unable to master their exotic instruments and play in tune. But sooner than anyone might have expected, they gained the upper hand. They espoused their gospel of period instruments, original sound and composers’ intentions in dogmatic, almost moral terms, often shaming conventional instrumentalists and ensembles away from early repertory. Along with the advent of the CD, their new-found repertory and fascinating new-old sound gave a boost to a classical recording industry then (as ever) in need of one. If early-music specialists have since lost some of their combative edge, it is largely because they have been absorbed into the mainstream, with pianists emulating the sound of the harpsichord in Bach, symphony orchestras scaling themselves down to chamber proportions in Beethoven and almost all performers adopting aspects of period style. So what was once a counterculture on the barricades, pleading its cause hot with passion, has for the most part won its arguments. The heat has cooled, and maybe some of the excitement. Performers who were its enfants terribles have become its elder statesmen. The British harpsichordist and conductor Trevor Pinnock, for one, is celebrating his 60th birthday by revisiting a landmark in both his professional life and the period-performance movement. In 1981 Mr. Pinnock and his band, the English Concert, caught the wave of excitement about period performance with a celebrated recording of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos for Deutsche Grammophon. It opened many ears, turning Mr. Pinnock and his players into stars. Now he is recording the “Brandenburgs” again, for the Avie label, this time with a crack new band, assembled from players in leading period ensembles, which recently convened in Sheffield, England, before a international tour. Oddly, through all of this, North America, with its wealth of musicologists and performers, and New York in particular, have been slow to follow. Mr. Pinnock, who himself tried to establish the Classical Band in New York in 1989, said the United States “is not a strong voice” in early music. Yet 50 years ago New York was something of an early-music hotbed, largely on the strength of Noah Greenberg and his New York Pro Musica Antiqua. Historians trace the modern early-music movement back to Arnold Dolmetsch’s colorfully reinventing viol consorts in the early 1900’s, and to events like the Göttingen Handel Festival in Germany, which started the slow process of restoring Handel’s operas to the stage in 1920. But by common consent, the first generation to make a real difference in the way early music is played and heard was that of Gustav Leonhardt and Nikolaus Harnoncourt (both born in the late 1920’s). And things really took off in the 1970’s, when a second generation emerged, creating period bands in every direction. Mr. Pinnock got in fast, founding his English Concert in 1972. In 1973 came Christopher Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music and Reinhard Goebel’s Musica Antiqua Köln. Ton Koopman’s Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra appeared in 1977, John Eliot Gardiner’s English Baroque Soloists in 1978 and William Christie’s Arts Florissants in 1979. Thus was the scene set for a cultural revolution. “Why it all got going in the 70’s I can’t explain,” Mr. Pinnock said, “except in terms of zeitgeist and the collective unconscious. We just seemed to have the same idea at the same time, which was that old music on conventional instruments had reached the end of a road. It was time to explore a new sound world that the generation just before us had opened up.” The lutenist and conductor Konrad Junghänel, who was in residence at the Göttingen Handelfest this summer, offered a different take. “I trace it back to 1968,” he said, “when Europe was in general political and cultural protest. Period performance followed on as a protest against the prevailing music establishment.” The disrespect that greeted early musicians back then was in many cases deserved, Mr. Junghänel says, because their technique was limited. “Players were finding their way with these instruments,” he added. “And when you hear recordings from then, sometimes you laugh, it’s so bad.’’ The conductor Nicholas McGegan, who directs the Göttingen Handelfest and the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque, points to “vastly improved techniques” today and to a change of attitude. “Early music used to come like brown rice,” he said, “in ‘this is good for you’ packaging that could be quite severe, didactic and forgetful that when you get on that concert platform, you’re giving a performance, not an academic paper on a performance.” Early music has since shed the dogmatism that accompanied the notion of authenticity. Today period performers — chastened by, among others, the music historian Richard Taruskin, who was once one of them — shun the word. “Looking back,” Mr. Pinnock said “I think people oversold what we were doing with the instruments as more than it was. In the right conditions old instruments help because you can push them to the limits of their capabilities, and they won’t get in the way. A forte on a modern keyboard is likely to be too thick. On a period keyboard, it won’t be. But we don’t always have the right conditions in modern concert halls. And the instrument is only a tool of the trade.” Another period conductor in retreat from dogmatism is René Jacobs, the director of an influential early-opera festival in Innsbruck, Austria. “We are now in a position where the facts of old performance practice are well known,” Mr. Jacobs said, “but we have risen above those facts. I don’t feel I have to reproduce how things were done in the past. I reimagine them. And in doing so, I respond to the current situation as well: the size of the hall, the acoustic, whatever.” Although a sense of fantasy is clearly back on the agenda, Mr. Jacobs still believes in scholarship and thinks the new generation of period players don’t do it rigorously enough. Mr. Jacobs also worries that the repertory is narrower than it should be by now: “Handel is of course the period-performance superstar, and his operas are now easy-listening. Likewise Monteverdi and — in France at least — Rameau. But there’s so much virgin territory in Italian opera: especially Alessandro Scarlatti, a great genius, though not so hummable as Handel.” THE meltdown of the classical record industry has been a problem. Mr. Junghänel said: “The early-music boom of the 70’s owed everything to radio stations like WDR in Cologne and to the record companies, who in those days were looking out for new and interesting work. They made all these ensembles possible. Now they just record Your Top 100 Pieces over and over. The repertoire shrinks, and the players themselves become less curious, less hungry to discover.” Meanwhile the geography of the period world has shifted. In the 70’s it centered largely on Britain and the Netherlands, but now the most exciting newer period bands are coming from elsewhere, notably Italy and Spain. Yet North America remains the great blank on the world map of period performance. It has some history beyond Greenberg, including the Boston Early Music Festival, which was founded in 1980. It has ensembles. And, Mr. Jacobs says, it has the best musicology in the world. “What comes out of obscure colleges in the middle of the Arizona desert is amazing,” he said. “But this doesn’t translate into everyday musical life. I don’t know why. Maybe the structures are too rigid, or there isn’t the motivation. So American players by and large still have to come and work in Europe.” When the British period specialist Harry Bickett conducts Monteverdi’s “Incoronazione di Poppea” in Los Angeles this fall, he will use Americans based in Europe. “That’s where they tend to live these days,” he said. “It’s too hard for them to make careers in their home country. I’d say the U.S. is 15 years behind Europe in the early-music stakes, and the reason is that America hasn’t learnt to take it for granted.” That kind of everyday acceptance of period instrumentalists as musicians, pure and simple, has been the quantum shift for period performance in Europe over the last decade or so. From being a discrete interest that divided the music world into those who played on period instruments and those who did not, it has opened out into a broad stylistic concern on the part of all musicians to investigate the historical context of pre-Romantic music. . A growing number of players now lead double lives, in period and modern bands. And those who don’t are at least respectful of their counterparts, and curious themselves. In that process, period-performance values have become an expectation rather than a surprise. And the pleasure of finding everything he has campaigned for during 25 years now taken for granted is, for Mr. Pinnock, worth all the attendant dangers. “When you graduate from the sidelines into the mainstream,” he said, “you create a new conservatism and risk losing the sense of discovery that drove you when you started. But to be mainstream was our dearest ambition in the 70’s, and I think we succeeded beyond expectation. Period consciousness is now basic to being a musician, whether you’re in the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra or the Vienna Philharmonic. We’re the same world now.” Next Article in Arts (3 of 14) »  MUSIC; A Set of Defiant Works, Two Ways, Both Difficult (June 25, 2006)  RECORDING; Brahms: The Sound and the Poetic Fury (May 28, 2006) SERVICES; Ring Tones Acquire Some Classical Tastes (May 3, 2006)  Mozart, Forever Young (April 14, 2006) Related Searches Classical Music Recordings (Audio) Scholarships and Fellowships you might be a music nerd if...  from: petrushka1611@yahoo.com Since nobody's posted anything on here within recent memory... You might be a music nerd if... 1. you whistle in style brisé. 2. your favorite pickup line is, "What's your favorite augmented sixth chord?" 3. your second favorite pickup line is, "Would you like to raise my leading tone?" 4. you have ever played the how-many-episodes-is-too-many-episodes fugue game. 5. you have a poster of Allen Forte in your room. 6. you know who Allen Forte is. 7. you dream in four parts. 8. your biological clock follows a non-retrogradable isorhythm. 9. you can improvise 16th-century counterpoint with no trouble, but you frequently forget how to tie your shoes. 10. you will look at a piece by Bach and say, "You know, I think he could have gotten a better effect this way . . ." 11. you expected something quite different out of The Matrix. 12. you can answer your phone with a tonal or a real answer. 13. you like to tease your friends and loved ones with deceptive cadences. 14. you know how large a major 23rd is without having to count. 15. you only drink fifths, and then you laugh at the pun. 16. you feel the need to end Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony with a picardy third. 17. your favorite characteristic of Brahms's music is the subcutaneous motivic play. 18. instead of counting sheep, you count sequences. 19. you find free counterpoint too liberal. 20. Moussorgsky's "Hopak" gives you nightmares. 21. you wonder what a Danish sixth would sound like. 22. you long for the good old days of movable G-clefs. 23. the Corelli Clash gives you goosebumps. Every time. 24. you can hear an enharmonic modulation coming a mile away. 25. you can hear Berg's lover's dog coming a mile away. 26. you have had to be forced to stop labeling motives. 27. you confuse fishsticks with ground bass. 28. you found No. 27 funny. 29. you have ever quoted Walter Piston. 30. you like to march to the rhythm of L'histoire du soldat. 31. your license plate says: PNTONL. 32. you have ever defended yourself with, "But Gesualdo did it!" 33. you have ever tried to do a Schenkerian analysis on "Three Blind Mice." 34. you have ever tried to do a Schenkerian analysis on 4'33''. 35. you have ever had a Gebrauchsmusik party. 36. you have ever tried to hop onto the omnibus. 37. you like to wake up to a Petrushkated version of "Reveille." 38. you lament the decline of serialism. 39. you know what the ninth overtone of the harmonic series is off the top of your head. 40. you keep the writings of Boethius on the coffee table. 41. you have ever dressed up as counterpoint for Halloween. 42. you have ever written a musical palindrome and given it a witty title. 43. you can name ten of Palestrina's contemporaries. 44. you have ever found a typographical error in a score by Ives, Nancarrow, or Babbitt. 45. you have ever heard a wrong note in a performance of a composition by Ives, Nancarrow, or Babbitt. 46. you already sensed that if this list had been written by Bartók, this would be the funniest item. 47. you enjoy the tang of a tritone whenever you can. 48. you've let the rule of the octave determine how you go from one event of the day to the next. 49. you have ever played through your music as if the fingering markings were figured bass symbols. 50. you suspiciously check all the music you play for dangling sevenths. 51. you have devised your own tuning method. 52. you keep a notebook of useful diminutions. 53. you have composed variations on a theme by Anton Webern. 54. you know the difference between a Courante and a Corrente. 55. you have trained your dog to jump through a flaming circle of fifths. 56. you have ever used the word fortspinnung in polite conversation. 57. you feel cheated by evaded cadences. 58. you organize phone numbers based on their prime form. 59. you find it amusing to refer to you ear-training course sections as your "pitch classes." 60. every now and again you like to kick back and play a tune in hypophrygian mode. 61. you wonder why there aren't more types of seventh chords. 62. you wish you had twelve fingers. 63. you like polytonal music because, hey, the more keys the merrier. 64. you abbreviate your shopping list using figured bass symbols. 65. you always make sure to invert your counterpoint, just in case. 66. you have ever told a joke with a punchline of: because it was polyphonic! 67. you have ever named a pet, instrument, boat, gun or child after Zarlino. 68. you have an <0 1 4> tattoo. 69. your lips may say, "perfect fourth," but in your heart it will always be "diatessaron." 70. you have ever said, "Yes, didn't Scriabin use that sonority in . . ." 71. you know dirty acronyms for the order of sharps. 72. you can name relatives of the "Grandmother Chord." 73. you're still wondering why I haven't included the "must-resolve-the-dominant-seventh-before-going-to-bed" indicator. 74. you can not only identify any one of Bach's 371 Harmonized Chorales by ear, but you also know what page it is on in the Riemenschneider edition and how many suspensions it has in the first four bars. 75. you got more than half of the jokes on this list. Click here: Money News- When Buying Organic Makes Sense -- and When It Doesn't - AOL Money & Finance When Buying Organic Makes Sense -- and When It Doesn't By BETSY MCKAY Grocery-store shelves are increasingly crowded with pricey organic versions of everything from milk and eggs to hot dogs and beer. But some of the options pitched as healthier may not always be worth their higher price tags. Organic Foods: To Buy or Not to Buy? Born as an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional farming methods, the organic-food industry has mushroomed into a juggernaut with nearly $14 billion in sales in 2005 and annual growth of roughly 20 percent. What's Your Favorite? Food empires like Dean Foods Co. and Danone SA now churn out organic products, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has become a major seller of organic food. One big reason food makers and retailers are scrambling into the business: Shoppers often are willing to pay a fat premium for anything with the word "organic" on the box. Organic Valley brand low-fat milk, marketed by the Organic Family of Farms/CROPP cooperative in La Farge, Wis., costs $3.69 per half gallon at a Publix Super Markets Inc. store in Atlanta, for instance, compared with $1.99 for a store-brand carton of nonorganic milk. More Advice From Diet Coach Marion Nestle AOL Diet & Fitness Coach Marion Nestle offers a guide to the healthiest food for you and your family. Are brown eggs better for you than white eggs? Is fish really good for you? Is it worth it to drink bottled water? How can I teach my children to eat well? Get more diet tips from Marion Nestle Visit Marion's Web site Share your own tips and advice on diet More tips and advice from AOL Coaches The term "organic" refers to farming methods that eschew pesticides and other chemicals in an effort to protect the environment. But while some consumers do buy it to support the environmental goals, increasingly people seek out organic food for the perceived health benefits and to avoid chemical residues. More than 70 percent of Americans buy organic at least occasionally, according to marketing firm Hartman Group Inc. Since 2002, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has imposed strict standards on which foods can say "organic" on their labels. Fruits, vegetables and grains must be grown on land free of prohibited synthetic fertilizers or sewage sludge, and genetic engineering and irradiation are not allowed. Meat, poultry and milk must come from animals that are free of the growth hormones and antibiotics that are given to conventionally raised animals to boost production, and must be fed organic feed. They also must have access to the outdoors -- although that doesn't mean they always get to roam free. But organic food isn't necessarily more healthful than conventionally produced food, say many scientists. Some conventional foods are already low in chemicals and high in nutrients. For instance, most of any chemical residue on a nonorganic banana or orange gets thrown away with the peel, anyway, nutrition and environmental experts say. So careful consumers who want food that packs a health benefit in addition to supporting a cleaner environment may want to consider what organic foods are really worth the higher prices. Here's a look at some of the research behind the potential benefits of organic foods: Fruits and Vegetables Slashfood A Cut AboveNo matter what your taste, Slashfood sets the table.   Retro-Cookery Food Porn How-To's A shopper's guide issued last fall, based on U.S. government data, ranked pesticide levels in 43 conventionally grown fruits and vegetables. The guide, from the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization that raises concerns about pesticides, found that many were already low in residues, including broccoli, asparagus, avocados and onions. Among fruits and vegetables that were found to be higher in residues than other produce are peaches, apples, sweet bell peppers, strawberries and imported grapes. The effects of multiple pesticides on the body at once aren't known, says Richard Wiles, EWG's executive director. It's important to note that even those fruits and vegetables that ranked higher in residues have pesticides still within levels permitted by the government. The levels of pesticides in the produce on the EWG's list are "orders of magnitude" below those levels deemed safe by the EPA and the USDA "after years and years of study," says Shannon Schaffer, a spokesman for the U.S. Apple Association, a trade association for apple growers, shippers and packers in Vienna, Va. Conventional produce is "perfectly safe," says Mike Stuart, president of the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association in Maitland, Fla., which represents 250 growers of organic and conventional produce, and its purchase is "a personal decision by individual consumers." In terms of nutrition, some studies, some of which are funded by the organic-food industry, have found higher levels of antioxidants and other nutrients in organically grown corn, strawberries, peaches, tomatoes and other produce. But even if organic produce does have more antioxidants, it's not clear that they offer nutrition benefits to humans, says Alyson Mitchell, associate professor and food chemist at the University of California, Davis, who has conducted some of the studies. Recent E. coli outbreaks have made some consumers wonder if eating organic baby spinach or other produce might reduce their risk. Food-safety experts say that's not the case. "There are issues about growing produce whether it's organic or conventional," says Robert Tauxe, a food-borne-diseases official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Bottom line: It may not make much difference to spend money on organic versions of foods already low in residues. Generally, say organic experts, it makes the most sense to buy organic versions of foods that you -- and especially your growing children -- eat a lot of. But if your main concern is nutrition, it's unclear whether organic is more healthful. Meat and Dairy Organic milk and meat don't contain residual pesticides because the animals they come from must be given pesticide-free organic feed or graze on land on which pesticides haven't been used for at least three years. The animals also can't be given antibiotics, which critics say can contribute to the spread of drug-resistant bacteria. Nor can they be fed animal byproducts -- leftovers from the slaughter and processing of other livestock that some fear might help spread mad-cow disease. In addition, many organic farmers feed their cattle grass instead of feed in their last five days of life to reduce the acidity in their stomachs in which E. coli bacteria can thrive, says Tedd Heilmann, general manager of Organic Prairie, Organic Valley's meat processor. Michele Peterson Murray, a spokeswoman for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the Denver-based trade association for U.S. beef producers, says conventionally produced beef is safe. Steps the industry has taken in recent years have helped reduce incidences of E. coli contamination by more than 80% in ground beef, and studies have shown that the type of feed given to cows doesn't affect the presence of E. coli, she says. Association guidelines also stipulate that producers shouldn't overuse antibiotics and should avoid those commonly given to humans, she says. The risk of transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, known as mad-cow disease, is also low because cattle can't be fed parts from other cattle, the association says. Consumers are also increasingly buying organic milk and meat because it is free of recombinant bovine growth hormone, a substance given to conventionally raised cows to boost milk production. Some scientists believe the substance poses risks to human health by stimulating another hormone linked at high levels to breast, prostate and colon cancers. Known as rBGH, the growth hormone hasn't been linked to an onset of early puberty in girls, however, as some consumers fear. It is banned in the European Union and some other countries, but the U.S. government approves it as safe. Ms. Peterson Murray of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association says, "Our belief is that there is no safety difference between certified organic and conventional beef. An adult woman produces 253,000 times more estrogen every day than what is found in a 3-oz. serving of beef." Milk doesn't have to be organic to be hormone-free. Responding to consumer demand, a growing number of dairies are producing nonorganic rBGH-free milk that is cheaper than organic milk. Dean Foods sells a nonorganic hormone-free milk in eight U.S. markets, including the Tuscan brand in New York and Alta Dena in Los Angeles, and the company is evaluating other markets, a spokeswoman says. The company, which has a large conventional-milk business in the U.S., still defends regular milk from cows that may have been given hormones. "The FDA has approved it as safe," says Marguerite Copel, a Dean Foods spokeswoman, adding, "We continue to watch the science as it evolves." Also, not every organic steak or carton of milk hails from a bucolic family farm, where cattle roam on grassy meadows. As bigger companies have entered the organic market, an increasing percentage of food comes from large, industrial-style facilities. It still fits government standards for organic, produced without chemicals or bioengineering. But beef touted as "grass-fed" may in fact come from cattle that spent only a small portion of their lives in a pasture, some critics say. The USDA required that chickens must have access to the outdoors, but doesn't stipulate how much. Organic Prairie requires its farmers to provide five square feet of outdoor access for each bird, Mr. Heilmann says. Bottom line: Risk of mad cow or E. coli is probably low in both organic and conventional meat. Organic may be worth buying if you are concerned about antibiotic use. If you are concerned about growth hormones, there may be cheaper alternatives to organic. And if it's farming methods that most concern you, read the labels: Some companies tout their production techniques to explain what they mean by terms such as "grass fed" or "free range." Packaged Foods Processed foods labeled as organic contain pesticide-free ingredients. But they still lose much of their nutrient value in cooking and processing, just like conventionally produced foods. For instance, the UC Davis researchers didn't find nutrient differences between organic and conventional pasta sauces. And the growing plethora of organic chocolate-chip cookies, crackers and other baked goods and treats are of limited health value. Some have more fats than conventional equivalents. "Eating processed organic food is not the road to health," says Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association, a nonprofit group in Finland, Minn. Watch for the way the term "organic" is used. Products with 95 percent or more organic ingredients may use the USDA organic seal. A product that is touted as "made with" organic ingredients" needs to contain just 70 percent organic content. Still, organic processed foods may be more healthful than their conventional equivalents if they are made with ingredients such as whole grains or healthier oils, and have fewer preservatives or additives. The bottom line: The real benefits to organic are in fresh foods, organic experts agree, and some organic processed foods may be worth the extra money for their whole grains or other healthier ingredients. If you do buy packaged foods, read the label, so you can see what ingredients the food really contains. Seafood There is no official "organic" label for seafood. Some seafood purveyors tout that their fish is "wild," which some consumers may perceive as more natural and healthful than farmed. But as waters become increasingly polluted it has become harder to make sure they are free of contaminants, experts say. The USDA is discussing organic-labeling rules for seafood, and a big question is how to ensure that fish get an organic diet. That can be done with farm-raised fish, which are in captivity, but not with all wild fish. Bottom line: Consumers who want organic seafood will have to wait.   | Welcome | Gizmo_Info | Gizmo Repertoire Schedule | Piano Services | St. Mary Music Program | Links | Pics and Stuff       Kenneth Farnum, Jr.'s Contact Info             www.NYMetro-EMS.com                   | Farnum's Forums |           and also... 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