Mark Coles, who gets to do some choice arts stories, came up with a real gem about Pygmy musicians from the Central African Republic taking part in Ligeti anniversary concerts in Britain.
They brought with them a musical tradition reckoned to be among the oldest known in the world, which is not to say the most primitive. Far from it.
As Coles explains, György Ligeti is among the great composers of our own day -- well, it's me who adds the "great" -- to have been influenced by the complex polyrhythms of these people.
The musicians featured in yesterday's report (a 6'14" Real audio clip from 'Today' on BBC Radio 4) flew to London for a concert among the many marking Ligeti's 80th birthday year.
The music of the Aka pygmies is rich, entrancing, and sophisticated. If you're old and irreverent enough, you might think that the whistles in the Coles sound-clip also inspired that wonderful late '60s TV series 'The Clangers'.
But I didn't hear my first recordings of Pygmy polyphony until a decade later, when I was writing mainly about many different musics in my last years at the Beeb.
The man who gave us those recordings was Israeli ethnomusicologist Simha Arom. Two of them, originally released by UNESCO on LP, are now on CD as part of the superb Radio France-Ocora collection.
Familiar to many who may think they've never heard of him since the orchestral piece 'Atmosphères' is among the Ligeti works Kubrick used for the music in '2001' soundtrack, the composer also wrote an introduction to Arom's learned tome, 'Polyphonies et polyrhythmies instrumentales d'Afrique centrale'.
There he described how Arom's pioneering and original approach got him thinking about the meter, or pulse, of music in new ways. Ways I'd very much rather listen to than tedious techno.
Anybody really interested can find a translation of Arom's book at Amazon -- for 180 dollars!
 Ligeti's String Quartets and a lot of African music are among the many things on my iPod, which already goes almost everywhere with me. Wow, have I fallen in love with it!
Some people recommend buying alternative headphones for Apple's elegant music player, but I'm far more impressed than I anticipated by the sheer quality of the "earbuds" that come with it. They'll do me nicely for now.
Apple, which released new software for the iPod along with updates to iTunes and QuickTime on Friday, claims you can put up to 10,000 songs on the 40GB iPod, but mine, at half that size, wouldn't run to 5,000 the way I'm going.
The most widely used "default format" for MP3s or the MPEG-4 (AAC) codec I use myself is 128kbps, but I've chosen to lose a bit of hard disk space to get the higher quality that comes with 192kbps. You'd have to be a very demanding music-lover indeed to push the compression format right up to the 320kpbs mentioned in a comparison at the end of an excellent iPod review in 'Stereophile'.
Since I've "ripped" more than 170 of my CDs on to the iPod and it's far from full yet, the answer to a frequently asked question in the past two or three weeks would be exceedingly boring.
It took me days, probably literally, to get all the details in the playlists right, even with the help of the fabulous Gracenote CD data base (CDDB). I've uploaded more than a dozen contributions to the CDDB myself, mainly of complete operas and other large works, as well as in the "world music" category.
All this kept me occupied during my recent "downer", a routine task to get on with when I lacked the inspiration to do anything else.
The CDDB is almost too useful to gripe about. Anything that can automatically give you so many details when you stick a CD into your computer is amazing!
But I do strongly object to one of its features: the idiotic limitations of categorizing music by "genre".
The database gives you a reasonably wide range of choices for the kinds of popular music you submit to it.
But when it comes to "classical" music, the selection is exceedingly limited.
There isn't even a separate category -- or sub-category -- for "Opera", let alone "Renaissance" or "Mediaeval". Or if there is, the iTunes interface won't let me submit items under such "genres". Which means that Monteverdi ends up in the same category as, say, Japanese contemporary composer Toru Takemitsu.
Most annoying is the use of "World" as a classification for anything that isn't the product of so-called Western musical culture.
This may keep things simple, but on my iPod, the Indian ragas are definitely not listed under the same genre as Balinese gamelan music or Malian singer and musician Rokia Traoré.
11:44:49 PM link 
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