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FT: Lunch with the FT: Lang Lang

This focus on education is not surprising. Journey of a Thousand Miles, Lang Lang’s autobiography, published next week in the UK, could be called Journey with a Thousand Teachers instead. At almost every step in his life, a teacher played a crucial role... At four, Lang Lang had his first lessons with a woman named Zhu Ya-Fen. Her own teacher committed suicide during China’s Cultural Revolution, when western classical musicians were ridiculed by students. The legacy she had passed on to Zhu was Bach and Mozart, which in turn Zhu handed on to Lang Lang. “She was a wonderful foundation tutor. And the thing is, not many Chinese teachers know how to play Bach. She’s probably the best Bach teacher in China,” Lang Lang recalls. This was partly a legacy of the Cultural Revolution, he explains: “Many of the teachers were trained in the Soviet Union in the Russian repertoire.”

.... The two lived off the $150 his mother sent from Shenyang every month, in an apartment so cold that his father would get into bed first to warm it up for his son. Life was miserable and father and son rowed bitterly over how much he practised. After his father lost his temper one day and shouted hysterically that Lang Lang should kill himself rather than bring shame on the family, the boy refused to play for four months...the stand-off between father and son was ended when a fruit-seller befriended the unhappy boy and encouraged him to continue to play. Then his first teacher, Zhu Ya-Fen, unexpectedly dropped by their home in Beijing after a teaching stint in the US. She arranged for him to work with a professor who got him ready for admission to the elite conservatory the next summer.

...what ultimately shines through the autobiography is his father’s obsessive love for his son – and not the outbursts that reviewers in the US, where the book was published last year, fixated on. “In the west this is very difficult for people to understand. Asians have a different view of life.”

Lang Lang tells me his father said to “a [Chinese] journalist that he was very touched by the book because he thought it showed I had grown up. I feel proud that he didn’t get upset or anything.”

In 1997, at 15, Lang Lang won a scholarship to the US and studied under Gary Graffman, whose own career had been cut short by an injury to his hand. Like other piano students at Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute, Lang Lang was given an apartment of his own, which he shared with his father, with its own seven-foot Steinway. Lang Lang woke in the middle of his first night there and went to touch the piano to make sure it was real. “It was just like heaven,” he recalls with so much feeling it might have been yesterday. “The smallest school in the world. The whole school is like one class of the (Beijing) conservatory. In the conservatory you used to have five or six people fighting over a little, stupid upright piano. You needed to have a ticket to play.”...

His sunny persona is unaffected, and Lang Lang is on to an anecdote about his former teacher, Graffman. “We live across the street from each other in New York and we have parties together.” Lang Lang took a mobile phone photo of Graffman’s flat and sent the photo to Graffman, who immediately called back. “He said: ‘Show me, show me’ [how to take pictures]. He’s really cute. He’s 81 and he’s into technology.” Lang Lang’s easy melding of American slang and informality with a typically Chinese reverence for a teacher is touching. If this is what it means to be a global citizen, we need more like him.
===

Lunch with the FT: Lang Lang

By Rahul Jacob

Published: April 11 2009 01:29 | Last updated: April 11 2009 01:29

Illustration of Lang Lang The worldwide celebrity that the pianist Lang Lang enjoys makes my initial reception at the Chinese restaurant in Paris he has chosen a little disconcerting. The waitress appears not to understand when I say the table is booked in the name of Lang Lang. As I am led to a small table at the front of the restaurant, I fret that I have mangled the tones – so crucial when speaking Cantonese and Mandarin – in pronouncing his name. While the two words look identical in English, his given name means “happiness and sunshine” and his surname means “educated gentleman” in Chinese.

Happily, Lang Lang, 26, soon arrives, dressed soberly by his flashy standards in a black jacket, black shirt and jeans. The glow of his fame and his friendliness transforms the scene. The manager greets him warmly and leads us to a table at the back of the restaurant, where a bamboo screen gives us the effect of a private room. This is a fixture at all good restaurants in Beijing and Shanghai. I ask him if he finds it hard to dine out in China because he is so well-known. “It is extremely hard – fortunately and unfortunately,” he says. That remark, I later realise, reflects his level-headed approach to being a famous pianist. He may be out of practice ordering at Chinese restaurants, however, because our small square table is soon heaving with a deep-fried aubergine starter, sweetcorn soup, delicious sautéed pork and a pot of jasmine tea – and the food keeps coming until there is barely enough room for my notebook.

No sooner is a dish placed on the table than Lang Lang’s chopsticks are flying over the plates as if he were conducting an orchestra, deftly lifting food on to my plate. (At one point, he lifts a strand of pork that I have dropped on my notebook and puts it on a side plate. He intermittently chides me for taking notes instead of eating.) “This restaurant is so good that every time I am in Paris I come here with friends and relatives,” he says. He’s in town for a concert. I am just off the Eurostar from London to meet him. He laughs when I tell him that when I first moved from Hong Kong to London some years ago, I looked for flats near Queensway in west London because the local restaurants have some of the best Chinese food in the city.

I struggle with my digital recorder for a minute and he can’t resist a joke – “It must be British-made” – a rebuttal of the cracks people sometimes make about the quality of Chinese-made products.

Chinese exports have begun to move upmarket – and Lang Lang has become one of the most public faces of the new China. He first burst into the international consciousness in a fairy-tale debut in 1999, aged 17, when he stood in for André Watts in front of 17,000 people at the Ravinia festival near Chicago. He had dreamed the night before that his piano was “a rocketship orbiting the globe”. When he finished playing the explosive first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1 to wild applause, his career went stratospheric. The assembled musical luminaries, including the conductor Christoph Eschenbach, the violinist Isaac Stern, the festival’s musical director and others, prolonged the night by asking him to play Bach’s difficult Goldberg Variations from memory, in a private recital that began after 2am.

Ten years on, with endorsement contracts ranging from Audi and Montblanc to Sony and Adidas, Lang Lang is often referred to as a crossover star, a classical musician who has rock star appeal. (Adidas now sells a Lang Lang trainer, bearing his name and gold stripes, for $125.) He played at the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies, and has a huge following in both the east and west, with much-watched appearances on YouTube. Today more than 30m Chinese people are learning to play the piano – a popularity at least partly attributable to his meteoric career.

With the recorder finally on, I ask him about this month’s series of concerts and programmes with the London Symphony Orchestra. He is particularly excited about a masterclass on April 18, which will climax with a performance of Schubert’s March Militaire for 100 pianists of all abilities from schools in east London. This is part of an effort he makes in several cities to make music fun for young people.

“What I find is the problem is the image of our work. The kids think that we are very boring people; never talk, like a robot, and are very arrogant. [They think] we are the elite. Actually, we’re not. We’re just a normal person. And that is the first thing we need to change when we go to all the schools, to inspire them and to say, ‘Look, guys, we are a normal person.’ ” Being closer to the age of students helps as well: “Many parents say, ‘Can you say something to my kids because if you say something they will listen.’ If you have learned wonderful things from other people then it is important to share that with young people.”

Lang Lang is evangelical in his efforts to spread the popularity of classical music. For a man who does as many as 130 concerts a year at about $50,000 each (according to figures published in The New Yorker), he still spends a lot of time in schools. Last November he started the Lang Lang Foundation to promote musical education in the US, Europe and China. He is also chairman of the Montblanc Cultural Foundation, which gives patrons of the arts €15,000 to donate to their favourite cultural cause.

This focus on education is not surprising. Journey of a Thousand Miles, Lang Lang’s autobiography, published next week in the UK, could be called Journey with a Thousand Teachers instead. At almost every step in his life, a teacher played a crucial role. Lang Lang was born in June 1982 in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang. His mother was a telephone operator; his father was a policeman by profession and a musician by vocation. Lang Guoren, who played a two-stringed Chinese fiddle called the erhu, started his son playing the piano at three. At four, Lang Lang had his first lessons with a woman named Zhu Ya-Fen. Her own teacher committed suicide during China’s Cultural Revolution, when western classical musicians were ridiculed by students. The legacy she had passed on to Zhu was Bach and Mozart, which in turn Zhu handed on to Lang Lang. “She was a wonderful foundation tutor. And the thing is, not many Chinese teachers know how to play Bach. She’s probably the best Bach teacher in China,” Lang Lang recalls. This was partly a legacy of the Cultural Revolution, he explains: “Many of the teachers were trained in the Soviet Union in the Russian repertoire.”

When Lang Lang was nine, his father gave up his job and took his son to Beijing so he could study for a place in the prestigious conservatory there. The two lived off the $150 his mother sent from Shenyang every month, in an apartment so cold that his father would get into bed first to warm it up for his son. Life was miserable and father and son rowed bitterly over how much he practised. After his father lost his temper one day and shouted hysterically that Lang Lang should kill himself rather than bring shame on the family, the boy refused to play for four months.

His autobiography reads like an Amy Tan novel: the stand-off between father and son was ended when a fruit-seller befriended the unhappy boy and encouraged him to continue to play. Then his first teacher, Zhu Ya-Fen, unexpectedly dropped by their home in Beijing after a teaching stint in the US. She arranged for him to work with a professor who got him ready for admission to the elite conservatory the next summer.

The book details his father’s outbursts and high-handedness but is dedicated to him and to his mother, Zhou Xiulan. I say that what ultimately shines through the autobiography is his father’s obsessive love for his son – and not the outbursts that reviewers in the US, where the book was published last year, fixated on. “In the west this is very difficult for people to understand. Asians have a different view of life.”

In spite of such fine schools as the Curtis and the Julliard, the crisis in music education, Lang Lang says, is in the US, not in China. Perhaps mirroring Asia’s ascendancy, while classical music audiences in London and New York seem to be greying rapidly, in Taipei or Hong Kong it sometimes seems as if the average age of the audience is about 10. Lang Lang replies that in the US, budget deficits mean that “the first thing they cut is music and art and many of the schools don’t have a music programme any more. There’s no training really for how to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. It’s [as] if you are a student and you don’t learn Hugo and Shakespeare. You can’t expect someone who has never listened to classical music to suddenly start listening to it when he is 30 years old.”

For all his technical fluency, Lang Lang has been criticised for “self-indulgent” playing. In part to help rein himself in, he has enlisted the conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim – a former boy wonder himself – to be his latest mentor. (Lang Lang asked the legendary Israeli musician to teach him on their first meet ing.) Every few months Lang Lang visits Barenboim in Berlin. “He teaches me how to control myself ... and not to let the emotion take over the knowledge. But the thing is, you need to have the fantasies – otherwise everyone plays the same.”

Lunch winds down and the table is cleared away speedily – sautéed mutton, Chinese scrambled eggs and heavy fried bread go back almost untouched – to make room for a huge platter of exotic fruit, which we pick at until it is time for him to go and have a nap before the evening’s concert.

Lang Lang’s conversation roams from Beijing’s transformation into an outward-looking city as a result of its hosting the Olympics to the Sichuan earthquake last May. The pianist helped organise a concert to raise money for victims. I ask about the plight of Huang Qi, an activist jailed for championing the cause of parents of some of the 10,000 children who died when shoddily made schools collapsed. He glides past this political question, saying he doesn’t know about it; as a Chinese superstar, he probably deems it unwise to answer.

Lang Lang is at the Barbican Centre with the London Symphony Orchestra from April 20; www.barbican.org.uk

April 10, 2009 at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

NY Times: Listening to Schroeder: ‘Peanuts’ Scholars Find Messages in Cartoon’s Scores

Listening to Schroeder: ‘Peanuts’ Scholars Find Messages in Cartoon’s Scores

By APRIL DEMBOSKY

Published: January 13, 2009

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — In a “Peanuts” strip from the mid-1950s, Charlie Brown walks through the first panel and finds Schroeder sitting in front of an adult-size hi-fi, his ear to the speaker. “Shh,” Schroeder says, “I’m listening to Beethoven’s Ninth.” Charlie Brown inspects Schroeder’s outfit. “In an overcoat?” he asks. Schroeder leans even closer to the speaker and responds, “The first movement was so beautiful it gave me the chills!”

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“Peanuts”/United Feature Syndicate

Scholars have analyzed the scores played by the piano-mad Schroeder in “Peanuts” and have found real Beethoven, including the “Hammerklavier” Sonata. More Photos »

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Schroeder’s (and Schulz’s) Muse

Times Topics: Charles M. Schulz | Ludwig van Beethoven

In the world of “Peanuts,” of course, Schroeder was the Beethoven-obsessed music nerd who lost patience when Lucy interrupted his practice and who called time-outs as a baseball catcher to share composer trivia with the pitcher. Yet musicologists and art curators have learned that there was much more than a punch line to Charles Schulz’s invocation of Beethoven’s music.

“If you don’t read music and you can’t identify the music in the strips, then you lose out on some of the meaning,” said William Meredith, the director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University, who has studied hundreds of Beethoven-themed “Peanuts” strips.

When Schroeder pounded on his piano, his eyes clenched in a trance, the notes floating above his head were no random ink spots dropped into the key of G. Schulz carefully chose each snatch of music he drew and transcribed the notes from the score. More than an illustration, the music was a soundtrack to the strip, introducing the characters’ state of emotion, prompting one of them to ask a question or punctuating an interaction.

“The music is a character in the strip as much as the people are, because the music sets the tone,” Mr. Meredith said. To understand what gave Schroeder chills, he said, you have to listen to the musical passage. “When you actually hear the symphony, the whole thing feels completely different.”

That linkage is the central theme of “Schulz’s Beethoven: Schroeder’s Muse,” an exhibition at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center here, which was jointly organized with the Beethoven center. (It continues through Jan. 26 at the museum and will reopen on May 1 at the center in San Jose.)

Mr. Meredith spent more than a year identifying the compositions, gathering recordings and reinterpreting the strips; Jane O’Cain, the museum’s curator, researched Schulz’s artistic process and music-listening habits.

In the resulting show visitors can gaze upon the Beethoven strips, then tap a number into their audio guide and hear the music Schroeder is playing.

In a strip from 1953 Schroeder embarks on an intensive workout. He does push-ups, jumps rope, lifts weights, touches his toes, does sit-ups (“Puff, Puff”), boxes, runs (“Pant, Pant”) and finally eats (“Chomp! Chomp!”). In the last two panels he walks to his piano with determination and begins playing furiously, sweat springing from his brow.

The eighth notes above Schroeder’s head are from the opening bars of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata (Op. 106), a piece so long, artistically complex and technically difficult that it is referred to as the “Giant” Sonata. When Beethoven delivered it to the publisher in 1819, he is believed to have said, “Now you will have a sonata that will keep the pianists busy when it is played 50 years from now.”

According to the exhibition notes, classical music was as much a priority for Mr. Schulz as drawing was when he attended art school in the 1940s. He once said of his classmates, “We all collected classical albums, which we frequently shared on evenings when we got together to listen to music and challenge each other in wild games of hearts.”

Sue Broadwell, who worked as Schulz’s secretary from 1963 to 1967, said he played classical and other records — “he had a weakness for country western,” she said — in his studio while he worked. “He encouraged me to take a music appreciation course, which I did,” she said. “Every once in a while, as I was learning different pieces, he’d whistle some for me and I had to guess them.”

Mr. Schulz also regularly attended classical music concerts here with his family.

“He could sit almost perfectly still the whole time, without squirming, without crossing his legs,” said Jeannie Schulz, the cartoonist’s widow, who helped found the museum and serves as president of its board.

During concerts, she said, “he would pull a notebook out of his breast pocket and write something down,” adding: “Later in the car, he would say, ‘How would it be if Marcie and Peppermint Patty were at a concert, and ...’ He was always thinking about his characters.”

Although Schulz greatly admired Beethoven, his favorite composer was actually Brahms. He simply found that the name Beethoven — the way it sounded and the way it looked on the page — was funnier, the exhibition notes remark.

Accuracy and authenticity are hallmarks of the strips, whether they deal with music, sports or medical conditions, Ms. O’Cain, the museum’s curator, said. “With figure skating, he would carefully study books to make sure the jumps or spins that he had characters portraying, that they were correct,” she said. He would add subtle twists or inside jokes for readers familiar with skating or surfing or shorthand.

Mr. Schulz also mined Beethoven’s life for material. He had numerous books in which he underlined details about Beethoven’s love life, clothing, even his favorite recipe (macaroni with cheese).

“I have read several biographies of Beethoven — being strangely fascinated by the lives of composers, much more so than the lives of painters,” he said in 1975. As a result, Schulz fans like to point out, the strips are as educational as they are entertaining.

“What you thought was a funny tagline was an absolutely true story out of Beethoven’s life,” said Karen Johnson, the Schulz museum’s director.

Beethoven’s birthday was a perennial “Peanuts” event. Schroeder appeared in “Peanuts” for 49 years, and the composer’s birthday was acknowledged in 27 of them. Sometime in the 1960s Mr. Schulz hosted a real-life birthday party for Beethoven in his home in Northern California, according to Ms. O’Cain’s curatorial research. He drew Beethoven sweatshirts for each of the guests, two of which have been tracked down. One with the composer’s portrait is in the show.

The other, owned by Lee Mendelson, the producer of the Peanuts animated specials, features a full-body drawing of Beethoven — in a Schroeder sweatshirt.

January 15, 2009 at 02:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

FT: Powered by music

Powered by music

By James Naughtie

Published: December 27 2008 02:00 | Last updated: December 27 2008 02:00

The Triumph of Music:

Composers, Musicians and

Their Audiences, 1700 to

the present

by Tim Blanning

Allen Lane £25, 384 pages

How unusual, and how refreshing, to delve into a book that places Joseph Haydn's first tour to London, Richard Wagner's opening of his Bayreuth opera house, and the death of Mozart alongside a paragraph that begins: "Inside the world of hard rock - traditionally a citadel of uncompromising masculinity - the turning point was the death of Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen, from an AIDS-related illness in November 1991."

In The Triumph of Music , Cambridge historian Tim Blanning describes the story of western music with confidence, sweeping from the question of how and when composers began to write for posterity, rather than for more ephemeral purposes, to the consequences for jazz of the death of John Coltrane, and the place of mass market popular music in the social changes of our own time. He never loses touch with the seriousness of his mission yet juggles his sources and his observations in a dazzling and high speed display. It's a formidable achievement.

Blanning abandons the linear approach and deals thematically with his subjects - the composer's calling, the nature of audiences and their patterns, the imperious march of music as the dominant art. Discussing music's "places and spaces", for example, he describes with a clear overview how composers were able to emerge from the church and the great house to the opera house and the concert hall, and how a kind of democracy was achieved. As a historian rather than a musicologist, he gives a convincing explanation of the "triumph" of his title, showing how the development of the composer in the western classical tradition marched together with the popularisation of music, and with what consequences.

In asserting that "music is the most romantic of all the arts," Blanning maps a masterly course from the court of the Sun King, obsessed with performance, through the classical period to the 19th-century romantics who were able to fuse ideas of heroism and artistic introspection with such bewildering ease. Blanning's treatments are short - he deals with "Bach, Handel and the Worship of God" in three pages, for example. But he conjures up such a pace that only a weary pedant would want to stop along the way.

Underlying his enthusiasm is the idea that even non- classical music-lovers often have a feeling for the tradition. They understand that a Beethoven symphony plays a heroic part in our story; that there is something about the Italians and opera that helped to shape the country; maybe even that there is a connection between a 20th-century tunesmith and the old masters of the art song.

It is easy to imagine a po-faced browser picking up this volume, noticing that the first illustration is of Brian May with his guitar on the roof of Buckingham Palace at the Queen's Golden Jubilee, and dropping the book in horror. That would be a mistake. The urges that drive composers and performers cross the centuries and every genre, and they're explained more clearly when the story is told in this manner. Above all, it's important to demystify the social story of music. Genius - even mere brilliance - may be impenetrable; surely Mozart's "divine simplicity" can't be reduced to anything more. But everything else can be explained - how audiences changed; how musicians refined their techniques and found new instruments; how music played its part in politics and social change.

Blanning is too sensitive a cultural historian to suggest that the story is fascinating simply because it can be told. He is driven by a belief in the power of music, a feeling for its permanence. He writes with passion and manages to cast such a wide net that he never needs to pause to make that case: its thread runs through every page. This is a believer's book, to be savoured.

James Naughtie is a presenter on 'Today' on BBC Radio 4 and author of 'The Making of Music: A Journey with Notes' (John Murray)

December 26, 2008 at 07:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

FT: Starbucks curtails its musical ambitions

Starbucks curtails its musical ambitions

By Jonathan Birchall in New York

Published: April 26 2008 03:00 | Last updated: April 26 2008 03:00

Starbucks, the global coffee shop chain, this week abandoned its ambitions of playing a direct role in the music production business, ending an experiment that became emblematic of the dramatic changes in the music industry over the past decade.

The move comes less than a year after Sir Paul McCartney became the first artist to launch an album of new songs on Starbucks' Hear Music label.

The retailer is handing over management of Hear Music, which it acquired in 1999, to Concord Music Group, its partner on projects including Sir Paul's Memory Almost Full album.

The move is part of a drive to cut costs and to focus on its core coffee business led by Howard Schultz, who resumed the position of chief executive officer of the company in January.

Hear Music reflected a search by both music companies and retailers to find new ways of reaching potential customers.

The label's first original recording, a 2004 tribute to Ray Charles called Genius Loves Company , won eight Grammy music industry awards when it was released in the two months after his death.

Starbucks will continue its efforts to exploit its stores' potential as a retail outlet for music, with Concord selecting and producing recordings that will be exclusive to the chain.

However, the relationship will now be closer to that emerging between the music industry and Wal-Mart and Target, the two largest mass discount chains, which are the largest channels for sales of traditional CDs.

Last Christmas, Wal-Mart launched Long Road out of Eden, the first album in 28 years by the Eagles, which was produced by the band's own recording company. The retailer also produces exclusive online recording sessions with artists ranging from Sheryl Crow to Lenny Kravitz on its website.

In January this year Target released an exclusive live album by John Legend, produced by his recording company, Sony BMG.

But while Wal-Mart's and Target's music strategy is aimed at attracting customers who will spend on other purchases, Starbucks says it will focus on selecting music and other offerings that reinforce the experience of visiting its coffee houses.

It is also continuing a relationship with Apple's iTunes that includes giving a free music track away weekly, and selling downloads of music through in-store wireless networks. It had earlier experimented with Hear Music stores equipped with kiosks where customers could download music.

The chain will also continue to work with the William Morris agency to promote books.

Starbucks also indicated that it will drop attempts to co-promote films, after aggressively backing the 2006 film Akeelah and the Bee with Lions Gate Films and Arctic Tale in 2007 with Paramount. Both films were released on DVD through the coffee chain, but were box office failures.

As a result of the changes, Ken Lombard, the former head of the entertainment division, is leaving the company, and responsibility for future projects will go to Chris Bruzzo, chief technology officer - reflecting the focus on wireless services.

April 26, 2008 at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

FT: Woman in the news - Madonna

Woman in the News: Madonna

By Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

Published: April 25 2008 19:47 | Last updated: April 25 2008 19:47

Madonna

This week Madonna became the first 49-year-old mother of three to top the British singles charts. Among female stars only Cher, at 52, has achieved the feat at an older age.

Her new single is also her 13th UK number one hit, the most by a woman. (It reached the top 10 in Billboard’s Hot 100 in the US.) In a neat twist, it occurs in the year marking the 25th anniversary of her first UK single, “Holiday”, which came out in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s second electoral victory.

It does not require a numerologist versed in the mysteries of Madonna’s beloved Kabbalah to decipher the significance of these numbers. They illustrate the singer’s extraordinary longevity in an industry that worships youth and churns through talent mercilessly. To survive in pop music as long as she has is remarkable enough; to cling on to her crown as queen of pop is unparalleled.

An instructive comparison can be drawn with her two fellow titans of the 1980s, Michael Jackson and Prince, both of whom join her in turning 50 this summer. Jackson’s career lies in ruins. Prince was reduced to handing away his last album as a freebie with a British newspaper. In contrast, the eyes of the world are on Madonna as she prepares to release her new album, Hard Candy, next week.

Her drive has not diminished since her appearance in 1983 on the television chart show, American Bandstand, when she warned, only half-jokingly, that she wanted “to rule the world”. In spite of parenthood, middle age and an estimated personal fortune running into hundreds of millions of dollars, the same desire to succeed burns on.

“In an ideal world, I’d like to exercise for three hours a day,” she recently said: those forbidding cheekbones and that ultra-honed physique are workaholism made flesh. Last year she signalled her intention to keep going into her late 50s by signing an innovative 10-year deal with Live Nation, the concert promoter, for a rumoured $120m (€77m). It commits her to making three more albums and guarantees her a large proportion of any touring revenues. “The paradigm in the music business has shifted and as an artist and as a businesswoman, I have to move with that shift,” she grandly announced.

To her critics, Madonna Louise Ciccone is right to describe herself as a businesswoman but wrong to call herself an artist. They deride her thin voice and modest musical talent and damn her as a triumph of self-marketing. There is a degree of truth in the criticism – in 1990 Forbes magazine anointed her “America’s smartest businesswoman” – but it misses the point. Pop singers do not require the vocal technique of Maria Callas. Image-making and an instinct to connect with the public’s fantasies are more important. It is precisely because of Madonna’s commercial acumen that the “Material Girl” is one of the greatest pop stars, in fact, up there with Elvis Presley and The Beatles.

Constant reinvention is the secret of her success. The wannabe dancer who moved to New York from Michigan in 1978 with – so legend has it – $37 in her pocket has adopted numerous guises from the good-time girl of “Like a Virgin”; the conical bra-clad dominatrix of the “Blond Ambition” tour; the hippy spiritualist of “Ray of Light”; and so on up to her current, rather eccentric, incarnation as a horseriding English countrywoman with a taste for US hip-hop and leotards. Her image changes have launched countless fads and fuelled a boom in jargon-filled academic studies about her as a post-feminist chameleon. Not all these shifts worked – the Che Guevara beret and camouflage fatigues of her 2003 album were dispatched amid accusations of unpatriotism in wartime US – but her understanding of the possibilities and limits of the pop market invariably wins out.

She has made her name in a male-dominated industry. Her first US single was marketed as black dance music, to her annoyance, with a New York street scene replacing her face on the cover. She has fought to take control of her image, which explains the powerful brew of rebelliousness and commercial energy she brings to her music.

Her love of breaking taboos has left a trail of enraged social conservatives, railing against displays of blasphemy, lesbianism and bad language (Madonna, until her English gentry makeover, was infamously foul-mouthed). The singer’s assertion of her femininity has had a profound influence on generations of young women; yet she has been quick to profit from the ensuing controversies, as when she published Sex, a coffee-table book of erotica, in 1992, which sold more than 1m copies within days.

Madonna’s changing looks, fascination with the body and competitiveness mark her out as a Darwinian entrepreneur. She has a Thatcherite impatience with restrictions – she recently complained bitterly about the congestion charge for traffic in her adopted home of London – combined with a strangely old-fashioned attachment to family and marriage. “Ritchie” reads the doormat in her Los Angeles bolthole, in reference to her alter ego as Mrs Ritchie, wife of Guy Ritchie, the English film-maker.

She has been pragmatic in business. Endorsement deals and tours keep her among pop’s top earners. Quick to grasp the language of music videos in the 1980s, she also understood the worth of playing live, which has become one of the music industry’s chief sources of income. Madonna’s last tour netted $195m in 2006. In 1992, she set up her own record label, Maverick, which released one of the decade’s biggest-selling albums, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. The only career blot is her woeful attempt to break into films, as the audience who lustily booed her directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, at this year’s Berlin film festival made clear.

She is said to be a cautious investor, valuing art and property over riskier ventures. A former manager recalled: “We had to fax her every cheque we wrote on a daily basis and she would call us to say if it was OK before we could send it out.” She ascribes her shrewdness to a working-class upbringing in a single-parent family, her mother having died when she was five.

Hard Candy ends with the sound of a tolling bell. It announces the end of her record contract with Warner Music, her label since 1982. It is not her best album – its thudding beats are as remorseless as her exercise regime – but it would be folly to bet against Madonna extending her tally of hits as she marches into her 50s. Cher has three more years to enjoy her record.

April 26, 2008 at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

FT: After the storm / I Used to Be Color Blind

After the storm, a rainbow for Obama

Published: March 27 2008 02:00 | Last updated: March 27 2008 02:00

From Mr Jonathan P. Kahn.

Sir, A generation ago, Irving Berlin penned the words and music to "I Used To Be Color Blind", an inverse title to an otherwise optimistic love song that could well have characterised the transparent and inclusive Obama campaign pre-Reverend Wright:

"That semi-circle that was always hanging about

Is not a storm cloud, it's a rainbow And you brought the colors out"

Barack Obama has fumbled, but fumbles can be recovered.

Jonathan P. Kahn,

Great Neck, NY 11021, US

lyrics below
fred astaire, ginger rogers version at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh5ZrDxS99U

IRVING BERLIN

I Used to Be Color Blind

Strange
How a dreary world can suddenly change
To a world as bright as the evening star
Queer
What a difference when your vision is clear
And you see things as they really are

I used to be color-blind
But I met you and now I find
There's green in the grass
There's gold in the moon
There's blue in the skies

That semi-circle that was always hanging about
Is not a storm cloud, it's a rainbow
And you brought the colors out

Believe me it's really true
Till I met you I never knew
A setting sun could paint such beautiful skies

I never knew there were such lovely colors
And the big surprise
Is the red in your cheeks
The gold in your hair
The blue in your eyes

April 02, 2008 at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

FT: Ovation in Pyongyang is music to US ears

Excerpt

Download new_york_philharmonic_pyongyang_arirang.wmv

...New York Philharmonic's emotionally charged debut performance in Pyongyang....The real magic came last.

" 'Arirang', 'Arirang'," the North Koreans whispered to each other as the violins played the opening notes. The people in the second and third circles leant forward to watch over the ledge. The piccolo peeped the tune, the violins sang languidly....Even as the musicians left the stage, the applause continued for several minutes. As Mr Maazel and the concert master returned to the empty stage, some North Koreans applauded over their heads.

"It seemed they were being so friendly with us through the music," said one North Korean woman in a peach-coloured traditional dress, white handkerchief in her hand. "My favourite was 'Arirang'. I felt very moved."

[clip attached]

===

Ovation in Pyongyang is music to US ears

By Anna Fifield in Pyongyang

Published: February 27 2008 02:00 | Last updated: February 27 2008 02:00

The final strains of "Arirang", the heart-rending Korean folk song about separation, had not even ended when the thumping applause started filling the East Pyongyang Grand Theatre last night.

Middle-aged men with purple-tinted glasses and women in traditional dress, visiting South Korean sponsors and Manhattan matrons in fur, they all leapt to their feet to celebrate the New York Philharmonic's emotionally charged debut performance in Pyongyang.

It felt like history.

Expectations were high for this trip, where the US's most prestigious orchestra went to a country founded on hatred of America. Just as cultural exchanges helped transform the US's relationship with China and the Soviet Union, some hoped this would be the beginning of warmer relations, and perhaps even détente, with North Korea. But few could have dared to hope the performance would have been so well received.

From the start, the concert was exceptional. On a stage flanked by North Korean and US flags, the orchestra played "Aegukga", the North Korean national anthem, and the "Star Spangled Banner". This would have been unthinkable 18 months ago.

The New York Phil moved on to Dvorak's New World Symphony . The applause was the kind of applause the audience might usually give at a revolutionary opera about agricultural production. The mood changed when Lorin Maazel, music director, turned to introduce the next piece. "It is written by America's most well-known composer and it's called An American in Paris ," he explained. "Some day a composer might write a work entitled Americans in Pyongyang."

The audience broke out into rapturous applause. The ice was broken. If this concert precipitates a thaw, it started here.

Unlike with the Dvorak symphony, the members of the audience seemed to respond to the Gershwin piece. Indeed, Dvorak and the like are de rigeur in North Korea, but Gershwin is something else. The audience as a whole suddenly seemed much more engaged.

Many North Koreans were quick to join the standing ovation. And then the fireworks began. For the encore, the orchestra played Leonard Bernstein's Candide , after which Mr Maazel explained the orchestra's special attachment to its former conductor.

"Imagine Maestro Bernstein coming back and conducting once more," Mr Maazel almost whispered. "Maestro, do me a favour," he said in Korean, backing off the stage to leave the orchestra to play Bizet's Farandole without him.

The sight of the empty green dais was spinetingling, especially given the historical connotations: Bernstein led the Phil to the Soviet Union in 1959.

The real magic came last.

As the piece closed, the applause was electric. And it was put on full display something rarely seen in North Korea: spontaneity.

The entire audience was on its feet, but this time it was not just the women in traditional dress who were smiling, it was the previously implacable bureaucrats too. They clapped, as the orchestra bowed.

Even as the musicians left the stage, the applause continued for several minutes. As Mr Maazel and the concert master returned to the empty stage, some North Koreans applauded over their heads.

Mr Maazel was also clearly moved. "It was a stunning, stunning reaction. We haven't seen that kind of enthusiastic reaction in a long time, and we have had some very successful concerts," he said after the concert. "When we saw that very enthusiastic reaction, we thought that maybe it was mission accomplished."

New York Times

Philharmonic Agrees to Play in North Korea

Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times

Lorin Maazel, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, conducted the orchestra in September.

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By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Published: December 10, 2007

Adding a cultural wrinkle to the diplomatic engagement between the United States and North Korea, the New York Philharmonic plans to visit Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, in February, taking the legacy of Beethoven, Bach and Bernstein to one of the world’s most isolated nations.

The trip, at the invitation of North Korea, will be the first significant cultural visit by Americans to that country, and it comes as the United States is offering the possibility of warmer ties with a country that President Bush once consigned to the “axis of evil.”

“We haven’t even had Ping-Pong diplomacy with these people,” said Ambassador Christopher R. Hill, the Bush administration’s main diplomat for negotiations with North Korea and the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs.

Just last week Mr. Bush sent a letter to Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s leader, suggesting that ties would improve if North Korea fully disclosed all nuclear programs and got rid of its nuclear weapons. Conservatives have criticized the Bush administration for engaging with North Korea when it has violated nuclear promises, and in the face of recent intelligence indicating its possible assistance to Syria in beginning work on a reactor.

State Department officials said the orchestra’s invitation from North Korea and its acceptance represented a potential opening in that Communist nation’s relationship with the outside world, and a softening of its unrelenting anti-United States propaganda.

“It would signal that North Korea is beginning to come out of its shell, which everyone understands is a long-term process,” Mr. Hill said. “It does represent a shift in how they view us, and it’s the sort of shift that can be helpful as we go forward in nuclear weapons negotiations.”

The Philharmonic’s trip, which has generated some controversy among orchestra musicians and commentators, will follow a venerable line of groundbreaking orchestra tours that have played a role in diplomacy, the most famous one, perhaps, taking place in 1973, when the Philadelphia Orchestra traveled to China soon after President Nixon’s historic visit and amid what came to be known as Ping-Pong diplomacy. In 1956 the Boston Symphony was the first major American orchestra to travel to the Soviet Union. The New York Philharmonic, under Leonard Bernstein, went three years later.

Of the Philharmonic’s excursion, Mr. Hill said, “I hope it will be looked back upon as an event that helped bring that country back into the world.”

The Philharmonic, led by its music director, Lorin Maazel, has been considering the visit since an invitation arrived by fax in August. It was a typed letter from the North Korean culture ministry, in English, accompanied by a cover letter from a private individual in California who said he was acting as an intermediary. The orchestra had the invitation authenticated by the State Department, which has provided advice and help in negotiating the terms of the visit. Mr. Hill said that he did not know how the invitation had come about. But its timing was significant, after a series of breakthroughs in a decade-long effort to have North Korea halt its nuclear program.

In February North Korea agreed to shut down its main reactor in exchange for economic aid and other inducements. The reactor was switched off in July, a month before the invitation. And in September the Bush administration said that North Korea had agreed to disable its main nuclear fuel plant and give an accounting of its nuclear facilities, fuel and weapons by the end of the year. Progress toward the Philharmonic’s visit accelerated when orchestra executives and a State Department official visited Pyongyang in October.

The final major logistical pieces of the concert fell into place late last week, after a visit to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, by Zarin Mehta, the orchestra’s president. The Philharmonic’s spokesman, Eric Latzky, confirmed that the trip was on, but he declined to discuss details publicly until a news conference at Avery Fisher Hall tomorrow, when it is to be formally announced.

Mr. Hill, who was in Pyongyang last week delivering Mr. Bush’s letter and inspecting nuclear facilities, said he planned to attend the news conference. He has spoken privately to the orchestra members. Even more surprising, the Philharmonic said that Pak Kil-yon, North Korea’s representative to the United Nations, would also attend, a rare public appearance by a North Korean diplomat. Mr. Hill said he believed that the conditions sought by the Philharmonic had been met. They included the presence of foreign journalists; a nationwide broadcast to ensure that not just a small elite would hear the concert; acoustical adjustments to the East Pyongyang Grand Theater; an assurance that the eight Philharmonic members of Korean origin would not encounter difficulties; and that the orchestra could play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Once the orchestra members had given their approval, the major stumbling block became transportation. The orchestra, staff members and journalists are expected to number about 250. A plane that can also carry the many large instruments had to be found. Asiana Airlines, a South Korean carrier, offered such a plane, provided that financing could be secured, said Evans Revere, a former senior United States diplomat who is president of the Korea Society, which helped plan the visit.

MBC, one of three main broadcasters in South Korea, offered to pay for the charter in exchange for the rights to broadcast an extra concert by the Philharmonic in Seoul on its return from Pyongyang, Mr. Revere said.

“The balance that’s being achieved here is pretty nifty,” he said. “It’s a nice message being sent to the peninsula that the premier American orchestra is performing in both capitals within hours of each other.”

One of the remaining loose ends is the procurement of climate-controlled trucks to transport instruments to and from the airport. One possibility is arranging for South Korean trucks to be driven across the border. The North Korean government can be unpredictable, and there is always the possibility that the visit could be derailed.

The concert is planned for Feb. 26 at the end of a previously planned tour in China. The orchestra is expected to stay in Pyongyang for two nights, with some teaching and a ceremonial dinner thrown in.

Some questions have been raised about the appropriateness of visiting a country run by one of the world’s most repressive governments. North Korea’s policies have been blamed in part for the famine-related starvation of perhaps two million people and it confines hundreds of thousands of people in labor camps.

If the orchestra goes to Pyongyang, “it will be doing little more than participating in a puppet show whose purpose is to lend legitimacy to a despicable regime,” Terry Teachout, an arts critic and blogger, wrote on the online opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal in late October.

Richard V. Allen, a national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, and Chuck Downs — both board members of the United States Committee for Human Rights in North Korea — made a similar point on Oct. 28 on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. “It would be a mistake to hand Kim Jong-il a propaganda coup,” they wrote.

Mr. Hill acknowledged that “in a very theoretical way” any kind of opening lends legitimacy to the North Korean government. “But not opening up has not had any positive effect in bringing North Korea out of its shell,” he said.

Mr. Latzky declined to discuss the concert program, but orchestra officials have said from the beginning that it would probably include American music.

February 29, 2008 at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

NY Times: In the Fight Over Piracy, a Rare Stand for Privacy

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/us/31bar.html?th&emc=th

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In the Fight Over Piracy, a Rare Stand for Privacy

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By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: December 31, 2007

The record industry got a surprise when it subpoenaed the University of Oregon in September, asking it to identify 17 students who had made available songs from Journey, the Cars, Dire Straits, Sting and Madonna on a file-sharing network.

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Harry Campbell

Adam Liptak’s column about the legal world appears on Mondays.

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University of Oregon's Motion to Quash

Record Industry's Response

University of Oregon's Reply

Record Industry's Reply

R.I.A.A. v. The People: Four Years Later (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

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Reactions From Around the Web

The surprise was not that 20-year-olds listen to Sting. It was that the university fought back.

Represented by the state’s attorney general, Hardy Myers, the university filed a blistering motion to quash the subpoena, accusing the industry of misleading the judge, violating student privacy laws and engaging in questionable investigative practices. Cary Sherman, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America, said the industry had seen “a lot of crazy stuff” filed in response to its lawsuits and subpoenas. “But coming from the office of an attorney general of a state?” Mr. Sherman asked, incredulous. “We found it really surprising and disappointing.”

No one should shed tears for people who steal music and have to face the consequences. But it is nonetheless heartening to see a university decline to become the industry’s police officer and instead to defend the privacy of its students.

The recording industry may not be selling as much music these days, but it has built a pretty impressive and innovative litigation subsidiary.

In the past four years, record companies have sued tens of thousands of people for violating the copyright laws by sharing music on the Internet. The people it sues tend to settle, paying the industry a few thousand dollars rather than risking a potentially ruinous judgment by fighting in court.

“People get pushed into settlements,” said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. “The Oregon attorney general is showing what a real fight among equals would look like.”

In his filings, Mr. Myers claimed to be looking for a middle ground.

“Certainly it is appropriate for victims of copyright infringement to lawfully pursue statutory remedies,” Mr. Myers wrote last month. “However, that pursuit must be tempered by basic notions of privacy and due process.”

“The larger issue,” Mr. Myers said, “is whether plaintiffs’ investigative and litigation strategies are appropriate.”

Mr. Myers questioned the tactics of MediaSentry, an investigative company hired by the recording industry. He said the company seemed to use data mining techniques to obtain “private, confidential information unrelated to copyright infringement.” He added that it may have violated an Oregon criminal law requiring investigators to be licensed.

A spokeswoman for MediaSentry said it collected only information that users of peer-to-peer networks make available to anyone who cared to look. She had no comment on the licensing law.

The record companies, in an apoplectic response in court, accused the university of having “a political agenda.” They said that it was protecting people who had broken the law and that it was not entitled to raise privacy and due process arguments on behalf of its students.

“Hundreds of universities and dozens of commercial Internet service providers have responded to the exact same subpoenas,” the record companies’ lawyers wrote.

James Gibson, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said Mr. Myers’s arguments had been raised in other cases and had met with little success. Still, Professor Gibson said, “it’s significant that a public university and its state apparatus is standing up to the R.I.A.A.”

Mr. Sherman, of the recording industry association, predicted that Mr. Myers’s motion would fail and said the industry’s litigation strategy had worked well.

“The litigation program, as controversial as it is often written up to be, has been very successful in transforming public awareness,” Mr. Sherman said. “Everybody used to think this was legal. Now everybody knows it’s illegal.”

Indeed, the program seems to be expanding, and universities are being asked to play an even bigger role. In February, the association started asking universities to identify students suspected of file sharing and to pass along “prelitigation letters” to them. The association says it has provided some 4,000 such letters to more than 150 colleges and universities. The letters offer the students what they call bargain settlements of about $3,000 if they act fast, by punching in a credit card number at www.p2plawsuits.com.

“The ‘reduced’ settlement amount, in other words, represents the record companies’ savings from cutting out the middleman — our justice system,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report.

The universities are under no legal obligation to pass the letters along, but most do. Those that don’t typically receive subpoenas like the one issued to the University of Oregon.

At least one other public university in Oregon has cooperated with the industry. In 2004, Portland State responded to a record industry subpoena by blandly and efficiently providing the names, addresses, phone numbers and goofy e-mail addresses of two roommates. The university said it could not say which student’s computer was involved, so it fingered both of them.

“We definitely felt betrayed,” said Karen Conway, the mother of one of the roommates. “They readily turned over private information without notifying us. They placed responding to a legal subpoena far above a student’s right to privacy.”

Though her daughter Delaney was blameless, the record companies’ lawyers demanded $4,500. It was, Ms. Conway said, “basically extortion,” and the family was forced to hire a lawyer. The case against Delaney Conway was eventually dropped. Her roommate settled.

Mr. Sherman said the University of Oregon should disclose what it knew and let the legal system sort out the rest. “It’s no different than us subpoenaing Verizon,” he said.

But an institution of higher education has different aspirations and obligations than an Internet service provider, which is why Portland State’s actions are so unsettling. The University of Oregon’s efforts may be doomed, but there is something bracing about them nonetheless.

All the university is saying, after all, is that the record industry must make its case in court before the university will point a finger at one of its own.

Online: Documents and an archive of Adam Liptak’s articles: nytimes.com/adamliptak.

December 31, 2007 at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Springwise - Amiestreet, Music

August 6, 2007

Amiestreet, where every song starts off free, just closed a Series A financing round led by Amazon.com. The amount of Amazon's investment hasn't been disclosed, but it's an interesting development in the online music arena.

Prices at Amiestreet are determined by demand, increasing to a maximum of USD 0.98 per song depending on how many people download it. The more popular a song, the faster its price will increase to 98 cents. Besides giving early buyers a better deal, the market price system gives consumers the added pleasure of seeing they've discovered a song or artist before everyone else has.(See our earlier article on Amiestreet for more.)

As explained by AmieStreet.com's co-founder and CEO Elliott Breece: "AmieStreet.com grew from the idea that we needed to make buying music social and fun. The Amie Street community took over from there, driving a shift toward a music marketplace where consumers decide what is popular and what music is worth. We're thrilled to have Amazon.com's support in empowering music consumers."

Website: www.amiestreet.com
Contact: hollerback@amiestreet.com

August 08, 2007 at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

FT: The other side of the equation

He found hints of those universal truths in his violin playing, especially Beethoven. But most of all he found hints, a great satisfying assurance, in his personal sort of religion. He did not believe in God per se, but felt there had to be some kind of harmonising principle behind the patterns of the cosmos. “The fanatical atheists,” he wrote, “are creatures who cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

The other side of the equation

Review By David Bodanis

Published: August 4 2007 01:13 | Last updated: August 4 2007 01:13

Einstein: His Life and Universe
By Walter Isaacson
Simon and Schuster £25, 675 pages
FT bookshop price: £20

The popular Einstein story is impossible to resist. A young man fails his mathematics exams yet becomes the world’s greatest scientist. He works in obscurity. When he publishes his great papers, he’s ignored. Despite all this – and his autism – he triumphs. But he does so only with the help of his wife, a key source of his ideas.

It turns out that none of that is true. The reality, however, is even better. American biographer Walter Isaacson is a bit too respectful of his material. He writes in a polite, almost awe-struck tone and goes on for so many hundreds of pages that the reader begs for a bit more selection. But his new book is still fun to read.

Einstein was actually an excellent maths student, mastering calculus by 15. His father and uncle nurtured his curiosity. Once, when Einstein was ill as a child, his father bought him a compass. How, possibly, did its needle move? Something hidden was behind things, but neither of them could work out what.

Coming from a family of such inquiring minds meant that Prussian-style schooling was impossible to take. Einstein hated most of his teachers in Germany for their discipline and teaching by rote. His resistance to authority was a problem at university. His main physics professor taught dully and Einstein didn’t hide his dissatisfaction. Although he graduated well, the professor refused to write recommendations for academic jobs.

Einstein ended up in a patent office in Bern. But even that wasn’t as isolated as has often been portrayed. He assessed electrical machinery – as hi-tech then as the evaluation of Silicon Valley start-ups today. As for his supposed autism, he excelled at making friends. He put people at ease with jokes and stories. He’d even nabbed his university’s one female physics student as a wife.

There was severance from all his friends and colleagues in 1905, however, when he put his ideas together in a flurry of papers. One culminated with his equation E=mc2. It asserted that two realms that everyone had thought of as separate – mass and energy – were actually one and the same. Mass, he proposed, could be turned into energy. He even suggested that radioactive metals might one day have their inner power unleashed this way.

His wife was a good physics student, but didn’t come up with the idea. The suggestion that she did seems to have come from Serb nationalists in the 1960s (she was originally Serbian).

Within months, his papers were recognised by leading physicists. A few years later he had left the patent office far behind. In time his own creativity faded and he ended up repeating the same approaches. But in his years of success he got closer than anyone to discovering the universe’s deep truths.

David Bodanis is the author of ‘E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation’ (Macmillan)

August 05, 2007 at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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