Newsletter July 2005

We have sent out a second July newsletter.
Click here to bounce down the page.

Charles Ives' Universe Symphony was released July 4th 2005.
It's available by mail from us here via our new shopping cart.

Every time we add something new, you'll see a linked guide to it here, with our archive of past Newsletters.

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It’s been a long wait, but it’s finally here. We released the premiere recording of Johnny Reinhard’s definitive realization of Charles Ives’ Universe Symphony Monday July 4th, a date that just had to be for this radical ‘father of American music’. Here we are July 7, just three days late due to our massive site upgrade.

The symphony itself defies easy description, let alone categorization. An extraordinary piece of ear candy, it features a first half hour for mostly the percussion section (which has 14 players). Overall, it’s 64 minutes long, and required 74 musicians when first performed at Lincoln Center, New York, on June 6 1996.

Our new CD features a full color, 32-page booklet with two extended articles about the piece by Johnny Reinhard (which you can also read here). We also provide on-site translations of them in Italian, German and Spanish, with Russian and Japanese on the way. To round everything off, the package is completed with a glossy cardboard jewel case cover. We couldn’t think of anything else to improve it…

There is a huge amount of Ives-related resources on the site. You can start and select from them all at our Charles Ives Central page, as well as download four five-minute extracts in mp3 or m4a. We have introduced the m4a format for download (also known as AAC or mpeg-4), since it’s the same size as an mp3 and sounds better. See our note about the different ways of hearing audio around the site.

Other good news this month is that our CD prices have gone up. But they now include priority mail shipping in the USA and Canada. And for just $4 extra per order for any number of CDs, we ship anywhere in the world by air mail. After we turn an order around in New York within two business days of you placing it, you get the goods within three days in the USA and Canada, or within six days elsewhere. Full details at our secure Shopping page.

We have implemented a high-level shopping cart, featuring 128-bit security (as strong as most bank sites) so that you may order our CDs efficiently and promptly, directly from us. Just click on a ‘buy cd’ link like the one to the left anywhere on the site and off you go to the store where you’ll find your order already noted. If you have registered with us, your cart details will remain after you leave. Note that nothing happens until you sign off on an order, and that we don’t store credit card numbers after an order is finalized.

All our tracks should be available for download sale by mid-August. From each, we now offer a large, freely-downloadable chunk (from the track’s dedicated page) so that you can check the music out offline., as well as the familiar RealAudio.

We have revised all 850 pages on the site, very carefully hand-knitted, and introduced dynamic buttons to the left of all pages to speed your navigation. There’s also a mass of new hi-res graphics downloads. All our free music downloads are now available in m4a and collected on our Free Music Download page.

If you have any comments, ideas or grumbles, let us know through our Contact pages.

Übersetzungen	Traduzione	Traducciones

Deutsch	Italiano	Castellano

July Newsletter #2

It’s 95F outside, so we thought we should work a little harder to provide a few more details for you.

Lene Lovich’s CD, Shadows and Dust, will be released September 13, a lucky number Tuesday. Lene will be in New York, playing Joe’s Pub Monday September 12 at 9.30pm. We’ll be steadily expanding her home at the Stereo Society, starting with a collection of brand-new photos (also available in hi-res download).

BETTY are also active. They headline Summer Stage, in New York’s Central Park, on Saturday July 23. Support acts are Jane Siberry and Tracy Bonham. Doors open 1.30pm, Jane Siberry at 3pm, then Tracy Bonham, then BETTY at 5pm or so. It’s free.

Those of you who have bought the Ives Universe Symphony: thank you. And thanks also for all your great, complimentary comments on the music, the performance and the sound. We remind you that you can hear four extended extracts (around six minutes each). Either stream them or download them.

We have posted the full translations of Johnny Reinhard’s two long, introductory essays. The latest one is Russian, adding to German, Spanish and Italian, with Japanese under construction.

Some of you have had trouble with the shopping cart. On older browsers and slower connections, the secure server might respond too slowly, resulting in a time-out. We have changed servers three times in the past eight months in pursuit of the best operational arrangement, and so hope that with the latest these troubles will be over.

We expect to have the changeover completed by the end of next week. If you have any difficulty after that, please let us know through our Contact pages.