Category: Music

Clutter for Mac OS X

Only about a year after everyone else, I have discovered Clutter, a Mac OS X program that quietly looks up the cover art for whatever tune you happen to be playing in iTunes. You can drag album covers to the desktop to create a visual link to the album in iTunes and – the best feature for me – copy the album art to iTunes with a quick key combination. Great for all that music ripped from my CD collection.

The Sans Day Carol

One of my favourite carols, although it’s not well known, is the Sans Day Carol, from the village of Sans Day or St. Day, between Redruth and Truro in Cornwall. An-Daras.com has the song in Cornish (‘Ma Greun War An Kelynn), with literal translation. The traditional English version is here.

Purcell and doggerel verse

I was listening to Henry Purcell’s Odes and Welcome Songs on the way home. They’re worth a listen if you haven’t – various songs for birthdays, arrivals or general celebrations of the monarchy, plus some for Saint Cecilia’s Day (22 November). As always with Purcell, the English is set beautifully, with accent and quantity always absolutely right. The thing that really strikes you, however, is the ghastly doggerel verse he had to work with – presumably provided by some grovelling royal acolyte.

The most tortured and implausible brown-nosing surely comes in the Ode The Summer’s Absence Unconcern’d We Bear, one chorus of which ends with the lines:

Then would we conclude that our Isle,
Which of old was “the Fortunate” call’d,
Had her name but foretold
By some learned bard, who in times past foreknew
How in ages to come, she’d be happy in you.

What can you do with that? But Purcell sets it absolutely beautifully – what an artist!

Amazon link: Purcell: The Complete Odes and Welcome Songs

iTunes for stattos

I never knew till just now that you can copy the contents of your iTunes library view (or any other view) to Excel using copy and paste, on a Mac at least. This enables you to do all sorts of statto-ish calculations. For example, it turns out that since I bought this laptop (about 18 months ago), I’ve listened to 26,644 tracks, with a total playing time of just over sixty-five days. And subtotals? Don’t even get me started on subtotals.