Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Rod Stasick <>]

Hi folks,

Found something rather interesting.

I'll try to keep this short...but many of you may have heard

about "The Loudness War" which is a reaction to the fact that

many record labels that release pop music often will cut off

all the "highs" and "lows" of an album, so as to make the album

seem to be as loud as possible for young ears who are swayed by

loudness equaling "good."

So, there's a website that, unofficially and maybe not too scientifically,

has a ratings scale to measure dynamic ranges of various recordings - 

actually, it's currently at over 77,000 releases. You can read about it here:

http://www.stereophile.com/content/unofficial-dynamic-range-database

I'm mentioning this here, because tied for the top two places in "proper"

dynamic range are the same Cage recording (but one as a lossy download

and the second as a lossless CD recording) of the S.E.M. Ensemble recording

of the Concert for Piano & Orchestra and Atlas Eclipticalis. There's a Feldman 

recording at 4th place and others that you may find interesting at this link

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/dr/desc

(for the best dynamic ranges)

other Cage recordings:

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=John+cage&album=

and here for the general, searchable webpage:

http://dr.loudness-war.info/

It yields some interesting results when you do

some searching of favorite recordings.

hope everyone's having a good springtime!

best to all,

Rod

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Now playing: Giacinto Scelsi - Alleluja for Violoncello Solo (1970)