About a year ago I wrote an article titled “Musical Crimes: Forgery, Deceit, and Socio-Hermeneutics” at Cambridge, under the excellent supervision of Dr. Benjamin Walton, Jesus College. Since putting the article online, I’ve had a lot of feedback from people all over the world, so I thought I’d share it in the public space, along with the original article.

I’ve just had a very interesting email from Frank Manheim in Fairfax VA, who commented that:

Thank you for a stimulating foray into the world of artistic forgery. I have always admired and  venerated Elemer De Hory, the Hungarian painter who more or less by accident launched forgeries of the great Parisian painters of the early 20th Century, and Hans van Meegeren, the Dutch forger of Vermeer who nearly got himself executed for collaboration with the Germans because he delivered supposed Vermeer masterpieces into the hands of Hermann Goring.

I revere Fritz Kreisler and appreciate the BBC jokesters who put together a totally ad hoc, mechanical combination of music played backward, vacuum cleaner noise and other excrescences and portrayed them as new compositions by a composer with an unpronounceable Polish name, (gaining respectful mention by some British music critics for London papers before the fraud was revealed).

It seems to me that these evidences stamp the 20th Century arts establishment as phony: pretense and arbitrariness mascarading as depth and discernment. I’ve also observed that such “smoking guns” are never explained  or even mentioned by the magisters of the formal arts world. They are astutely simply ignored - as thought they didn’t exist. That has been a successful strategy, because if they were attacked, writers who have penetrated the veils like my heroes in music,  Henry Pleasants and Nicholas Tawa could gain influence with younger musicians graduating from conservatories and undercut the future existence of the establishment in its present form.

Now there is a caviat to be mentioned in a book that I seem to have mislaid, that deals with the psychology and pscychoneurology of music. It claims that neuropsychiatric and physiologic studies have shown that certain areas of the brain become better developed in professional composers or other musicians who are actively interested in experimental contemporary music. In other words, musicians who work intensely with complex musical structures develop the ability to enjoy certain kinds of compositions that may have little meaning for average music lovers. And once they pass that threshhold they may no longer be able to identify with normal classical musical audiences - even if they wanted to.

A case in point is Leonard Slatkin, a conductor, who served as music director for the Washington National Symphony for many over the past dozen years. He is famous for his affinity for audiences, and enjoys giving “afterwords”, discussions of music after concerts. Yet, not a single one of his 73 commissions of new music - however beguiling they may sound when described - have aroused any affection in audiences.

Now my question. I agree wholeheartedly with you. If there are “Haydn” forgeries that sound as good as Haydn, let’s enjoy them!  Can the Haydn works be accessed? And are any of the enterprising groups in the UK going to offer CDs of them. I’ll be the first buyer! Moreover, I think that the “fake” business could enormously stimulate museum visits for art - though I suspect the establishmentarians would energetically reject anything that could discredit their august authority.

Cordially,  Frank Manheim, Fairfax VA.

So, to answer Mr Manheim’s questions. The ‘lost’ Haydn keyboard sonatas cannot, as far as I know be accessed anywhere; Robbins-Landon and Badura-Skoda destroyed any reference to the works, alongwith, I believe the ‘original’ manuscripts. I spent some time networking around various scholars trying to see if anything could be found, but my efforts were to no avail. The works were going to be recorded as part of one of the most anticipated releases of the decade - a ‘complete’ set of the keyboard sonatas - but once proved to be forgeries record companies quickly lost interest. To the best of my knowledge, the only record of the event ever occuring is in newspaper clippings and the memories of amused musicologists.

Interestingly, my article has somehow (honestly not by myself) become the Wikipedia definition of a musical hoax at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_hoax and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Turovsky-Savchuk.

Do write any comments beneath on your views on the subject - let the debate continue!

I’m currently reading an absolutely amazing book called My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. On the surface its a murder mystery surrounding the death of a Turkish miniaturist in the 16th century. Yet, what makes the book such a treasure to read is its clever and insightful criticism of art, and the differences between Eastern and Western art forms. Its a distinction we’re rapidly loosing in the modern world, espeically, dare I say, online. Websites fall into the category of design (implying a sense of functionality, control, purpose) rather than art (in some way the opposite, though impossible to define). Yet should they? The answer is a topic for some more posts, but for now, consider this from the end of a chapter of My Name is Red titled “I Am a Tree”. It is a tree in a picture describing its existence:

A great European master miniaturist and another great master artist are walking through a Frank meadow discussing virtuosity and art. As they stroll, a forest comes into view before them. The more expert of the two says to the other: “Painting in the new style demands such talent that if you depicted one of the trees in this forest, a man who looked upon that painting could come here, and if he so desired, correctly select that tree from among the others.”

I thank Allah that I, the humble tree before you, have not been drawn with such intent. And not because I fear that if I’d been thus depicted all the dogs in Istanbul would assume I was a real tree and piss on me: I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.

Introduction

I live in a house with six fantastic house-mates, and we all have different computer setups, media types, computer abilities and so on. I’m running a Mac with OS X Leopard on my desktop and Ubuntu Hardy on my laptop; my friend Gareth is running Ubuntu and a modded Windows XP; and the others are running Windows in various states of dissarray (I actually have two of their laptops on my desk, trying to restore some usability to them after they’ve been exposed to the Cambridge network, unprotected, for three years).

We all love music, films, and so on, and Gareth and I are both keen web-developers. Couple this with the fact we don’t have a TV that works, bad TV reception even if we did, and the spare computer with a 22″ widescreen we have lying around, and the case is obvious: make a media center! Choice of OS fell naturally to Lunix and Ubuntu: Windows XP is a nightmare, and we have strong moral reasons; OS X I tried, but couldn’t get to usefully install; whereas Ubuntu two of us have extensive experience with, and its stable, relaibale, and feels right.

So here’s a list of the things we wanted from it, and in the subsequent posts, I’ll explain how we set them up:

• Watch DVDs.
• Connect to all our iTunes music libraries and play music.
• Play a few games.
• Be controllable from Ubuntu laptops/Mac OS X desktops.
• Hold a central file share - a sort of drop box for files we all use.
• Share our photos.
• Be usable by total technophobes. No ’sudo apt-get install’ for normal people.
• Be running a webserver that we could use to test new sites and code.
• Be discoverable by Windows/Mac/other Ubuntu networked computers.

We weren’t bothered about recording or watching live TV (yet…).

The Basics

First of all, I’m going to assume you have a network ready PC of reasonable power (ours is a 1.7Ghz P4 with 1GB RAM) set up and working, and a reasonable knowledge of Ubuntu.

To begin, download the latest version of Ubuntu (Hardy, 8.04 in this case) and install it. This is covered everywhere on the internet, not least on the Ubuntu website. Create a new user for you personally, not the shared one we’ll use later for everyone to login with. Its handy to keep the two separate. We named our server ‘muso-server’, so just substitute this for your choice in this guide.

Next, boot it up for the first time. Once its up and running and connected to your network/the internet, you need to do a few basic post-install steps. First, go to System->Administration->Software Sources and select all the options on the Ubuntu Software and Updates tabs. Second, bring up a terminal and type the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade


This may take a while, but it will bring your system up to the latest version, ready to start tweaking. You may need to reboot to finish the updates.

Ok, the first thing we need is to be able to ssh into our server. Sitting on the floor in the lounge is not ideal… We’ll also need it later for controlling various things.

sudo apt-get install openssh-server


Now we can get a remote terminal up by typing

ssh [your username]@muso-server


from any Ubuntu/Mac system in the house. Now we add the Medibuntu repository to our apt list to allow us to get codecs, dvd playing software, etc.

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update


Then we installed some fairly standard media things: DVD Playback, Windows Codecs, Video Lan Client (vlc), Adobe Acorobat, ffmpeg (video playback), non-free-codecs (more codecs).

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2, w32codecs, vlc, acroread, ffmpeg, non-free-codecs


Finally, we created a new user that could be used as the standard login for everyone to use. This was a good way of keeping our personal accounts separate from a general house account. (Change ‘musos’ to whatever you like.)

sudo adduser --home /home/musos musos


And set the account to autologin (a possible security risk I know, but the account doesn’t have sudo possibilities, and we know who uses the computer) by going to System->Administrator->Login screen and setting the user to autologin after 30 seconds.

It seems that every day I’m faced with the same dilemma: do I spend most of my time working on regular, paid, contracts for clients, or, do I spend (initially) unpaid hours and hours developing my ‘Big Ideas’ for hopfully profitiable sites somepoint down the road?

The obvious answer is of course both. Anyone who’s read half the posts at www.lifehacker.com or similar knows that the key is in the balance. I need a regular income to pay the bills etc., even if some of the projects I do are less interesting or exciting than my own. Yet, the fun of web-design is often in trying to forfill that child-like dream of creating the uber-amazing-money-making website you’ve always dreamed of.

So in fact, the question is not which should I do more of, but how do I do both? We all know the grove we get into when a project is going well, up all night coding and inventing. It almost seems counter productive to stop and begin a totally new taks, spending an hour getting back to grips with it and so on.

Instead therefore, I fell into the trap of doing neither, but writing about it on my new shiny blog. Now what did that achieve?

Hello. This post title probably implies yet another cliched first blog post. I guess, in a way it is: hello, welcome to my new blog.

Yet, at the same time it isn’t. You see, I recently (a few weeks ago) developed RSI (Repititive Strain Injury) from typing up my dissertation and practicing the violin too much. I typed some 25000 words in about 10 days, all whilst doing 3/4 hours of playing a day. Considering the strain I was probably putting on the fine motor control in my fingers, coupled with pretty bad typing posture, it hardly seems surprising that my hands gave up on me.

Having been to see the doctor a few times, several physiotherapists, and talking to other people who’ve had similar injuries, there’s several things I’d recommend computer ‘geeks’ like me do to avoid permenant damage:

1. Absolutely make sure you’re posture is good. Like playing the piano, make sure you sit squarely at your desk, with both hands equally elevated, and both wrists higher than your fingers. The damage happens when you raise your fingers above your wrists, pulling your hand backwards.
2. I love apple, but their old iMac keyboards suck. I just bought a new one (the really flat, low profile ones), and its already much better to type with.
3. Stretch. Essentially, whatever muscles you continually use, stretch them regularly in the inverse. For the violin that means ‘unwinding’ your left hand in the opposite contortion to how you play. The same applies for typing.

This said, it still doesn’t explain the title of this post. “Hello World” is a reference to the fact that I am actually dictating this post to my Mac, rather than typing it. The last time I used any dictation software was years ago with IMB’s ViaVoice, and whatever it may be now, then, it was awful. But, this MacDicate I’m using now is actually doing a pretty good job. It’s picking up words fine, and obviously letting me dictate straight into Firefox (and Mail, Word etc.). It doesn’t work for code, though how you’d teach a dictation program to do so I don’t know.

If there’s anyone reading this it would be great to hear from you (comments below), or anyone that’s got RSI from typing or music…