I’m always concerned bout video, because while it’s nice to have some imagery to go along with the music, to say nothing of a nice record of a live performance, typically the audio is not quite what I hoped it would be–the microphone tends to be far away from the performers, and is not always the appropriate kind of microphone for dynamic classical music, etc. Still, I have an initial run of videos I’d like to share, and hope to be adding many more over time.

Please feel free to subscribe to the video channel (and forward to your colleagues and friends). Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/user/RDRussell2

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Photo by Michelle V. Agins for the New York Times

So far, said Candace Hoyte, a supervisor at the Manhattan store, the instruments have drawn a steady stream of attention, especially from children. They skip past the video game stations and head straight for the instruments, banging away at Roland electronic drums or tapping on one of the dozen or so keyboards, she said.

What–passing up video games?! Perhaps parents might now start to serve up a musical instrument to their child rather than a new video game system.

And what might it suggest about the human condition–and about music–that the desire to express oneself through music is so appealing and such a draw?

I find myself wondering what kind of music education, if any, these children receive. Will they ever learn to play an instrument? To read music? To compose? For the sake of our shared humanity, I hope so!

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The internet is shaking things up in ways no one could have ever expected. Take the recent Google / Viacom battle. Google owns YouTube.com, and claims it is not culpable if anyone posts copyrighted material there. If the copyright owner asks for an infringing video to be removed from the YouTube website, Google will remove it. But this is very expensive for Viacom, to spend all day trying to find copyright infringements and so Viacom says Google must bear the responsibility of policing the YouTube website. Viacom has recently sued Google over this issue.

Can there be a compromise?

Perhaps not, and whoever wins, it will have a detrimental effect. In the New York Times of March 17, 2007, Joe Nocera writes that for either side…

Victory would be sweet, but losing could be disastrous. If Google wins, YouTube will never have to pay much to anyone for copyrighted content, and companies like Viacom will wind up either handing over their material or continuing to ask that it be removed — again and again and again. Smaller companies — not to mention the artists themselves — will probably have less control over their own work. If Viacom wins, YouTube will no longer be able to allow copyrighted content to be posted — which will surely hurt its business prospects. And it will make it more dangerous for any Internet site to use copyrighted material — even when it is legal to do so.

Copyright in the age of the internet is going to make the lawyers rich for decades to come.

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