In Brief: Winter Discontent Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• With hat tip to Stefan Jackiw, this five-year-old conducting Rite of Spring is at least more restrained on the podium than Gustavo Dudamel. He also has a very inventive gesture to communicate how he wants the music to end. [YouTube]


• Aerial photographs of the Federal City after Snowpocalypse 2010. [Fox]


• One of the things I try to keep track of in the Ionarts Concert Calendar (in the sidebar) is cancellations, and it has kept me busy during the unprecedented snows this winter. Tim Smith has some thoughts on the costs of snow cancellations for performing arts organizations. [Baltimore Sun]


• Mark Sarvas shakes his fist at comment spammers trying to gum up his site with ads for thesis/essay cheating services. Fight the power! No free ads! [The Elegant Variation]


• A neat trick to create the optical illusion of levitation. [Boing Boing]


• We ♥ the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and not only because the organization has made ten complete symphony recordings available for free download on their Web site. [Royal Concertgebouw]


• La Cieca has heard a rumor that Decca will not release a live recording of Les Arts Florissants's Giulio Cesare after all. [Parterre Box]


• Bruce Hodges has the word on the premiere of a new chamber work by Elliott Carter, Nine by Five. [Monotonous Forest]


• Scott Spiegelberg wonders out loud about just how long it will make sense to keep teaching undergraduate music theory students about chromatically altered chords in Schumann's Lieder instead of focusing on 20th/21st-century harmony. Geez, if you're going to throw Schumann out the window, what chance do the fugue, Renaissance counterpoint, or even older musical styles have? Surely, courses in pop harmony and hip-hop rhythm are the next phase of the "updating" of the academic music curriculum. [Musical Perceptions]


• Should composers have to pay an application fee to have eighth blackbird consider their new work for a commission? [Sequenza 21]