This is where a new service called SkreemR steps in. It specifically lets you search for MP3 files and displays the metadata associated with them so you can tell whether you’re downloading the latest Beyonce single or a Mozart symphony. You can find music by bitrate, length, artist, genre, and album in addition to title.

One neat SkreemR feature is the built-in music player that lets you preview a song before downloading it. It’s also interesting that you can rate search results. This might come in handy for filtering out junk audio files.

http://www.digitalalchemy.tv/2007/07/download-free-mp3s-with-skreemr.html

http://mp3sparks.us/?p=7

I consider myself only a casual Fogerty fan, having only the excellent The Long Way Home compilation in my collection, but I’m always interested to hear what he’s up to at any given time. News of a new album, Revival, due October 2 got my attention. Seeing the names who are helping bring his new batch of songs to life have probably made this a must purchase for me.

The lineup of musicians on the new disc include super sessionman Kenny Aronoff – who Fogerty has worked with previously — on drums and the incomparable Benmont Tench of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers on keyboard. He’ll also be joined by David Santos and Justin Perrin on bass and guitar, respectively.

Is that any good?

The Heartbreakers and The E-Street Band are two of the best backing rock bands in America, and the members of each have done fabulous session work for other artists during breaks from their day jobs. I’m by no means expert enough to rate piano players, but I always love his work and the way it serves whatever song he may be playing.

A couple of my favorite Tench moments:

• “Straight Into Darkness” – A great piano intro on a great Petty song.
• “Melinda” – Most people won’t know this one. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers released a DVD of their performance on the PBS show Soundstage. During that set, Petty & Co. played a song that has yet to turn up on a Heartbreakers record and it features a wonderful, extended, jazzy run by Tench. It is glorious. You really must hear it.
• Dust — Tench did some session work on my favorite Screaming Trees’ record and his contribution really added a lot to the overall beauty and sound of the record.

I realize I’ve now turned this story about John Fogerty’s new record into a bit of Tench worship, but I’m really excited to hear these new songs with those musicians.

http://confessionsofafanboy.com/2007/08/02/being-john-fogerty-fogerty-to-release-revival-oct-2/

Music is considered food for the soul. It is also considered as medicine for a depressing soul or a tensed mind. Music has its different forms suiting different moods e.g. classical music, hip hop, rock and roll, blues, jazz etc. Each of these music types has their own regional and cultural traditions.

Classical music has its own noble history like the rest of the music types. Every culture and tradition has its own form of classical music that is played with the assistance of different instruments e.g. Indians, Chinese, Arabs and Europeans had their own traditions for classical music. Classical music is a broad, somewhat inexact term, referring to music produced, or rooted in the traditions of art, ecclesiastical and concert music. A music is classical if it includes some of the following features: a learned tradition, support from the church or government, or greater cultural capital. Classical music is also described as complex, lasting, transcendent, and abstract.

The Classical period in Western music occurred from about 1730 and 1820, despite considerable overlap at both ends with preceding and following periods, as is true for all musical eras. Although the term classical music is used as a blanket term meaning all kinds of music in this tradition, it can also occasionally mean this particular era within that tradition.

The Classical period falls between the Baroque and the Romantic periods. Among its composers were Muzio Clementi, Johann Ladislaus Dussek and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, though probably the best known composers from this period are Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven (as they all worked in Vienna, Austria, this period is often referred to as “Viennese Classic”). Beethoven is also listed as either a Romantic composer, or a composer who was part of the transition to the Romantic.

The Classical style as part of a larger artistic change

In the middle of the 18th century, Europe began to move to a new style in architecture, literature, and the arts generally, known as  Classicism. While still tightly linked to the court culture and absolutism, with its formality and emphasis on order and hierarchy, the new  style was also a cleaner style, one that favored clearer divisions between parts, brighter contrasts and colors, and simplicity rather than  complexity. The remarkable development of ideas in “natural philosophy” had established itself in the public consciousness, with  Newton’s physics taken as a paradigm: structures should be well-founded in axioms, and articulated and orderly. This taste for  structural clarity worked its way into the world of music as well, moving away from the layered polyphony of the Baroque period, and  towards a style where a melody over a subordinate harmony – a combination called homophony – was preferred. This meant that  playing of chords, even if they interrupted the melodic smoothness of a single part, became a much more prevalent feature of music,  and this in turn made the tonal structure of works more audible.

Since polyphonic texture was no longer the focus of music, but rather a single melodic line with accompaniment, there was greater  emphasis on notating that line for dynamics and phrasing. The simplification of texture made such instrumental detail more important,  and also made the use of characteristic rhythms, such as attention-getting opening fanfares, the funeral march rhythm, or the minuet  genre, more important in establishing and unifying the tone of a single movement.

This led to the Classical style’s gradual breaking with the Baroque habit of making each movement of music devoted to a single “affect” or emotion. Instead, it became the style to establish contrasts between sections within movements, giving each its own emotional coloring, using a range of techniques: opposition of major and minor; strident rhythmic themes in opposition to longer, more song-like themes; and especially, making movement between different harmonic areas the principal means of creating dramatic contrast and unity. Transitional episodes became more and more important, as occasions of surprise and delight. Consequently composers and musicians began to pay more attention to these, highlighting their arrival, and making the signs that pointed to them, on one hand, more audible, and on the other hand, more the subject of “play” and subversion – that is, composers more and more created false expectations, only to have the music skitter off in a different direction.

http://teonix.net/en/categ-Music-167.html