DVD videos

If you want to purchase some DVDs of Classical Performances a cheap prices, go to the ebay shop here. Each DVD is either £3.99 (one DVD disc), or £4.99 (two discs). They don’t come with plastic DVD cases, but they are easily obtained for small pittance anywhere; they do, however, come with the paper cover for a case. The price for shipping is very good and they make excellent deals on bulk shipping. I bought sixteen videos with a Shipping of £12.30; very reasonable. The only downside, is that they will only ship to Europe and Australia. Quallity is excellent, and the region code is 0 (worldwide), some have Picture format of NTSC, but it works on my tellevision in Australia (PAL).

Worth a look! I will give a list when I recieve the second half.

MusBook.com

MusBook.com

MusBook.com is a relatively new (and still infant) social network. This one, however, is designed for musicians, both professional, amateur, and everything in between. It caters for a wide variety of professions within music as well as ‘music lovers’ and teachers.

The site has specific portals devoted to teachers, and education, and also has a section for jobs in music. While the site may have a few tiny issues (the ‘applications’ are ugly and obtrusive – they look more like a late-night advert for a mobile-phone dating service), the site looks promising, especially for a professional musician.

It allows videos, pictures and audio to be uploaded, which is a must for a music site, and while being rather an obvious necessary inclusion, is still worth noting.

I have recently been ’showcased’ on the site.

http://my.classicalmusic.org.uk/page/showcase-1

Twitter

I’m not entirely sure how this will help me, or indeed how to use it; however, if I get a few followers I will indeed strive find away of capitalising on it’s purported (metaphorical) wealth and keep it active as much as I can in the process. If anyone has a twitter account, post it in a comment and I will have a look!

http://twitter.com/yagankiely

Flickr

Match 3, originally uploaded by Yagan Kiely.

Sparkler, originally uploaded by Yagan Kiely.

Sparkler, originally uploaded by Yagan Kiely.

Sparkler, originally uploaded by Yagan Kiely.

As I have recently purchased a Fujifilm Finepix s1000fd, I have been experimenting with it. Thanks to GIMP, I can now edit to photographs (artistically).

These are my second batch of photo experiments. The first can be found on my Flickr photostream.

IMSLP’s Orchestral Parts Project (OP Project)

1 January 2009

Dear IMSLP Contributor, Member, Staff, Guest, or User

First of all I’d like to wish you a happy and prosperous new year and I hope you had a wonderful pre New Year holiday season. – To welcome the new year, I’m looking for expression of interest in an upcoming proposed IMSLP project. The Project involves the acquisition of a large collection of orchestral parts, and their upload onto IMSLP to access by all IMSLP users.

These orchestral parts are an extremely vast and priceless piece of information for the musical community, unlike the vast majority of IMSLP, these parts are for users to play rather than study that, in all practical situations proves mostly useless to perform with. This does not take away the usefulness of study, full, or reduction scores as they all play a huge role in the musical community. The addition of these scores to IMSLP will help improve IMSLP as well as provide amateur musicians to professional (and all in between) musicians free playable scores.

Since the project is of such a large scale (a rough estimate of ≈ 20 gigabytes) volunteers will be needed to fill several positions in main areas including (but not limited to):

• Administration
• Score Farming
• Logo Removal
• Copyright

Details on what these partitions involve and any requirements for the roles can be found here.
This is a semi-long-term project, but the more volunteers the quicker it will be completed. If you are interested in contributing to the project in any way, please contact me at
yagankiely {at} gmail.com and please include the role you wish to fill. I implore you to read what is involved in the roles before contacting me. You can request to join any of the main roles, but bear in mind that Logo Removal and Score Farming (in that order) will require the most volunteers, while administration will require the least. Any small contribution will help the project along it’s way.
Let me repeat that this is of eminent value to the community and a priceless acquisition not just of IMSLP, but of you. Please help it come alive – yagankiely {at} gmail.com

Sincerely yours,
Yagan Kiely B.mus., Composer, IMSLP Administrator

This Official Letter (properly formatted) can be found here.