String Theory Media

the opry's hal durham

I regret never having had the chance to meet Hal Durham, who died over the weekend, during my WSM research. His heyday running the Grand Ole Opry in the 1980s and 90s was well after the period I was able to study in detail. But everything I heard about him suggested he was a great servant of country music and a sensational manager. He did away with some arcane rules that were bogging down the Opry and signed some spectacular bluegrass artists on as members, including Alison Krauss, Ricky Skaggs and the Whites. Peter Cooper wrote a typically superb obit in the Tennessean, posted in full after the jump.

context is king

I wasn't able to attend the newly added second day of the Leadership Music Digital Summit yesterday, but Tuesday was packed with insights and great networking. It was the fifth annual event, and once again I was proud of our community for staging a business conference with such high level people and such a great environment for trading ideas.

It seems that the event's biggest headline grabber was a collaboration between internet service providers and the RIAA to refine the process by which RIAA finds and notifies music pirates. But I was taken by the Tuesday keynote address from Rio Caraeff, VP of eLabs, an R&D unit of Universal Music Group. He's the company's top futurist, and he conceded openly that his ideas are not company policy yet and that he's doing his best to turn around a battleship from within. However, he crashed through the bewildering debate over licensing, advertising supported free music and the rent-versus-own debate with an insight that has driven me and my business ever since I quit my job as a newspaper music critic and writer. 

Content is not king, he said, in diametric opposition to one of the great canards of modern media. Instead, CONTEXT IS KING. 

He's absolutely right, but what does he mean? 

new stuff: dailey & vincent

March 31 will be street date, whatever that means anymore, for a great sophomore album from Dailey & Vincent, "Brothers From Different Mothers" on Rounder Records. Jamie and Darrin joined forces scarcely two years ago, and they've rallied the bluegrass base like no new act in years and years. They pretty much swept both key bluegrass awards shows. The Grand Ole Opry embraced them immediately, as we documented last year. They seem genuinely destined for a long, fruitful run together. Their astonishing vocal blend is going to represent bluegrass in some important and unpredictable places in the coming years, and Brothers will likely be an album that converts a bunch of newcomers to bluegrass. We were fortunate to cut together the video liners you see below. Thanks to Karen Byrd for the video coverage of the boys' photo shoot with the great Jim McGuire. The CD release party is later this week at the Country Music Hall of Fame. Good times. Click HERE to see the piece on our YouTube channel, and please subscribe while you're there.

music training and empathy

I've long believed intuitively that musical training enhances people's ability to learn other things and process the world more sensitively, and there certainly is research out there to back that up in terms of mathematical and other analytical thinking, but these new findings are really amazing. Scientists at Northwestern (my alma mater, go cats) have found that people with musical schooling are more sensitive to the emotional content of sounds, including speech of all kinds. Key graph from the article at PhysOrg.com:

In essence, musicians more economically and more quickly focus their neural resources on the important -- in this case emotional -- aspect of sound. "That their brains respond more quickly and accurately than the brains of non-musicians is something we'd expect to translate into the perception of emotion in other settings," Strait says.

The implications range from being alert in a business meeting to responding to a child to communicating with one's mate. Is there anything more important in human relations than sensitivity to emotional overtones and subtext? Is there any better way to develop the parts of the brain that handle that subtle information? It's just more evidence that music is far far more than just pleasing sound.

Taking The YouTube Mashup To New Heights

I've posted about YouTube collaborations and remixes before, but this is the best I've seen. Israeli musician Kutiman pulled hundreds of music clips and layered, looped and transformed them into high art. What a joyful noise. The concept album's site ThruYOU is HERE. Be sure to check out the ABOUT tab to see a bit about how he did this.