News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
If much of the interest of high-quality papers lies between the lines—in the metaphorical fire that a paper lights in…
I would also recommend that potential grad students make inquiries into how far the compensation package actually goes towards cost…
It’s a mix. I’m still in the UAE with my family, and we feel safe. But some students and faculty…
In the above comment, Michel wrote: “As an aside, every once in a while I check out how the chatbots…
I could imagine LLMs having saved me a *ton* of time in graduate school–e.g., by having supplied reasonable answers to…
The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…
British studio musician Alan Hawkshaw, before he joined forces with Alan Parker in Rumplestiltskin, fronted The Mohawks, with his hammond organ featured prominently on their best-known song (mostly due to sampling in hip-hop in later years), "The Champ":
Feel free to add links to other Mohawks or Alan Hawkshaw songs.
Hawkshaw was for some time primarily a "library music" artist who contributed to a number of releases on the KPM Music label, which among other achievements was a publisher on Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief album, notable not least for its double groove side LP. Drop the needle and you hear one program; drop it again, and you might hear another.
I guess library music publishers existed to ease the permissions process of using music for advertisements, soundtracks, and such. Just goes to show the level of aesthetic care exercised by producers of such works.
Here are my two favourite Alan Hawkshaw KPM recordings:
Mermaid:
https://youtu.be/CTEY3LVrKh0?si=1Iqr-F7PbhIN6_8S
Dave Allen at Large:
https://youtu.be/U4vTwJCOlMg?si=b74GHX4SeJLrUIWi
About library music publishers, I believe these existed mainly in 60s, 70s, and 80s in Europe: KPM, de Wolfe, Themes, Bruton, Chappell in the UK, MP2000 and Musique pour l'Image in France, Gemelli and Sermi in Italy, and Selected Sounds in Germany (from the US I've only heard of records of NFL music library that produced music for sports broadcasting). As far as I know they hired mainly session musicians to produce music for tv, radio, advertising etc. This ranged from sound effects, noise, short jingles, silly melodies, and drum patterns to wonderful jazz, funk, rock and early electronic music. The labels then pressed the music on vinyl – usually only about 200-500 copies of each record (some of which has really cool cover art too). The records usually had a theme like drama, news or the like depending what the label thought the music would be suitable for. These records were never commercially available for the public, but rather distributed and sold directly to radio stations, television production companies, advertising agents and so on. They could then use the music commercially without having to negotiate licences separately – they merely had to pay a set fee. Some of these records would sometimes end up in second-hand shops and flea markets. I assume that in the 90s much of the vinyl was just destroyed though also occasionally whole boxes would come available. The records have, due to their rarity and quality, always been very desirable for collectors, DJs, producers and the like. The originals would start from $20-$30 for the records that are mostly noise and go onto hundreds and thousands of dollars for the ones that contain the best music. More recently some have been reissued as compilations and even made available on the streaming sites.
In addition to Alan Hawkshaw's brilliant KPM stuff, here are my other three library favourites:
Janko Nilovic: Xenos Cosmos (Editions Montparnesse 2000):
https://youtu.be/CWKM4fmZLSc?si=iL_Hg1aZblnpUF1x
London Studio Group: Bright Spark (de Wolfe)
https://youtu.be/uXMrT69aNzk?si=UnhLLXHSaCXqQBDX
Alan Parker and Madeline Bell: That's What Friends Are For (Themes):
https://youtu.be/v14b1gsCKss?si=z8FWpCH5r1XpDtLT
A neighbor of mine has a collection of library music LPs so vast that he has had to relegate it to his garage. Library music these days is truly "a thing."
Leave a Reply to Jussi Suikkanen Cancel reply