Showing posts with label England/Britain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label England/Britain. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Vuvuzela bans in England

BBC
Page last updated at 16:57 GMT, Tuesday, 20 July 2010 17:57 UK

Premier League and Football League clubs ban vuvuzelas


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Vuvuzela: The sound of the summer

A growing number of Premier League clubs are following Tottenham's lead and banning vuvuzelas from their grounds on match days this season.

Arsenal, Birmingham, Everton, Fulham and West Ham are the latest teams to have stated the plastic horns will not be allowed inside stadia.

Some Football League clubs have also banned the horns, which were popular at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Spurs made their decision after talks with police and local authorities.

The Londoners reacted upon suggestions the noise could pose risks to public safety, while Arsenal stated they wanted to "ensure the enjoyment and safety" of fans.

A Spurs statement on the club's official website. read: "We are concerned that the presence of the instruments within the stadium pose unnecessary risks and could impact on the ability of all supporters to hear any emergency safety announcements.

"We are very proud of the fantastic atmosphere that our supporters produce organically at White Hart Lane and we are all very much looking forward to this continuing into the forthcoming season."

The Premier League has refused to implement a widespread ban, stating that "such matters are dealt with at club level".

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Following their widespread use during the World Cup in South Africa, retailers across Britain have being selling vuvuzelas in anticipation of their popularity.

However, the horns have been heavily criticised by players and fans alike with many suggesting they are tuneless and block out singing and chanting.

The All England Club banned the instrument from this summer's Wimbledon, amidst fears that they could spoil the event.

Similarly, a spokesman for Henley Royal Regatta stated that vuvuzelas were on a list of items which would not be allowed within the enclosures or the boat tent area.

The England and Wales Cricket Board has said that each Test venue would be able to decide its policy on which items could be admitted.

Read the full post and see video HERE.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

African origin of Roman York's rich lady with the ivory bangle

Guardian

African origin of Roman York's rich lady with the ivory bangle

Re-examination of skeletons shows greater population mix than expected

The Guardian, Friday 26 February 2010

One of the richest inhabitants of fourth century Roman York, buried in a stone sarcophagus with luxury imports including jewellery made of elephant ivory, a mirror and a blue glass perfume jar, was a woman of black African ancestry, a re-examination of her skeleton has shown.

Now, 16 centuries after her death, her skeleton is helping prove the startling diversity of the society in which she lived.

"We're looking at a population mix which is much closer to contemporary Britain than previous historians had suspected," Hella Eckhardt, senior lecturer at the department of archaeology at Reading University, said. "In the case of York, the Roman population may have had more diverse origins than the city has now."

Eckhardt's work with a team of scientists and archaeologists, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and published today in Antiquity magazine, involved re-examining skeletons excavated over a century ago.

Isotope evidence suggests that up to 20% were probably long distance migrants. Some were African or had African ancestors, including the woman dubbed "the ivory bangle lady", whose bone analysis shows she was brought up in a warmer climate, and whose skull shape suggests mixed ancestry including black features.

Read the whole postHERE.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Halloween History from HuffPo

Read full story at HuffPo

The History Of Halloween Plus 5 Things You Didn't Know About The Holiday!

Huffington Post | Katla McGlynn
First Posted: 10-30-09 11:01 AM | Updated: 10-30-09 11:42 AM

Americans love Halloween. We as a country spend over $5 billion a year celebrating it. But where did the holiday come from? And how did traditions like asking strangers for food and dressing up as ghosts develop?

Halloween has its roots in Samhain (pronounced sow-in), an ancient harvest festival held at the end of the Celtic year. The festival marked the end of summer and the beginning of the dark wintertime. It was believed the spirits of the dead returned on this eve to damage crops and play tricks on the living. It was also believed that the Celtic priests, or Druids, were able to make predictions about the future, which they did during large bonfire celebrations where they wore animal skins and sacrificed crops and animals to the spirits.

In early A.D., Romans came to the Celtic territories of modern day England, Scotland and Northern France, and were the first people to influence the celebration of Samhain. They brought their own holidays: Feralia, the Roman day to honor the dead in late October, as well as another holiday to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. It is possible that this Roman influence is the reason apples are given out and bobbed for on Halloween.

By 800 A.D., Christianity spread to the Celtic Territories and brought with it another holiday, "All Saints Day." Pope Boniface IV, the designator of All Saints Day, was likely trying to replace Samhain with a similar but holier holiday meant to honor saints and martyrs. Later on, All Saints Day was renamed "All Hallows" and thus the day of Samhain (Oct. 31st) began to be called "All Hallows Eve," and eventually shortened to "Hallowe'en."

All of the holidays that were melded together to create our modern version of Halloween involved dressing up in one way or another. The celebrators of Samhain wore animal skins at their bonfire celebrations and those that observed "All Saints Day" often dressed as saints or angels. Later on men in Scotland would impersonate the dead on the day, explaining the ghoulish tradition we still observe.

During the mid 1800's, Irish and English immigrants flooded the United States and brought Halloween with them. From these immigrants we received the Halloween traditions we recognize today, however skewed they are now. For instance, the first trick-or-treaters were far from today's smiling children with commercialized costumes. They lived in Medieval England, and practiced "souling," in which poor people would beg for sweet breads, in return for praying for the families' souls. Later, the immigrants who brought Halloween to America would develop their own version of trick-or-treating, but it didn't become popular here until the 1930s.

Read the full story (including the five things) at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/the-history-of-halloween_n_321021.html

Sunday, March 30, 2008

The Story Of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop

Sound On Sound
The Story Of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop
Founded in 1958
Published in SOS April 2008
[ARTICLE PREVIEW ONLY]
People : Artists/Engineers/Producers/Programmers


50 years ago this month, the most celebrated electronic music studio in the world was established. We trace the history of the Radiophonic Workshop, talking to the composers and technical staff who helped to create its unique body of work.
by Steve Marshall
I was 10 years old. As the last 'whoosh' of the Doctor Who theme dissolved into a wash of tape echo I sat transfixed by the light of the television, eagerly reading all of the end credits. "Wow!" I exclaimed. "I want to get a job in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop when I grow up!"
"I'm sorry, son," said my father. "You won't be able to do both."
Although it never felt like a 'job', I did eventually get to work in the Radiophonic Workshop. I was only there for three months, but I've never stopped going on about it. Wouldn't you too, if you'd been lucky enough to have worked in the most famous electronic music studio in history?

The story of the Radiophonic Workshop began half a century ago, in 1958.
Britain in the 1950s was a bleak place, as the nation struggled to rebuild itself after the devastation of war. Food rationing had continued right up until 1954, when bananas finally came back on sale; anything worth having was still in short supply. We now think of the '50s as the rock & roll years, but the UK charts for 1958 tell quite a different story. Elvis was there for a few weeks; so was Jerry Lee Lewis — but the chart is mostly dominated by the likes of Perry Como, Connie Francis and Vick Damone. It was a dull time for music, but things were about to get more interesting...

Defects Of The Brain
One of the few benefits of wartime had been that some women had an opportunity to work in jobs previously denied to them; Daphne Oram was one. Daphne had started working for the BBC as a 'music balancer' during the war, turning down a place at the Royal College of Music to do so. After her promotion to studio manager in the '50s, she began pestering the BBC to follow the lead of the French broadcasters, and to provide a facility for the production of electronic sound and musique concrète. Desmond Briscoe (1925-2006) was also a studio manager, with similar interests, so in 1957 the pair teamed up to produce some innovative programmes for the BBC Drama Department. Using borrowed test oscillators and tape-splicing techniques, they produced sounds that had never been heard before on the BBC.

Their nagging finally paid off, and in April 1958 Desmond and Daphne founded the Radiophonic Workshop in the BBC's Maida Vale Studios (a former ice-skating rink). They were joined later in the year by 'technical assistant' Dick Mills. Brian Hodgson came along in 1962 and he eventually ended up running the place. Brian adds: "Workshop was then a very popular word among theatre 'types', and it gave away the Drama Department origins. It was originally going to be called the Electrophonic Workshop, but it was discovered that 'electrophonic' referred to some sort of defect of the brain, so it had to be changed! A board was set up to see that the place was run properly. Unfortunately, one board member had a doctor friend, who advised that three months should be the maximum length of time that anyone could work there, as staying any longer could be injurious to their health; they'd go mad, or something. This problem recurred throughout the Workshop's history — just as a recruit was getting into the swing of things, they'd have to leave."

Daphne Oram was the first to fall foul of this rule. After three months in her new job, she was ordered back to work in a control room at Broadcasting House. But for some reason Desmond Briscoe was not required to leave: instead he was appointed as the Workshop's Senior Studio Manager. For the BBC's women, it seemed, the war was over. A lengthy and bitter row ensued, and eventually, Daphne left the BBC for good in 1959, moving to an oast-house that she'd bought in Kent and establishing her own Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition. She was replaced by Maddalena Fagandini.

Fag-ends & Lollipops
John Baker was another stalwart Radiophonic Workshop composer.
The Workshop's reputation grew over the next few years, and the ranks swelled with the addition of Brian Hodgson, Delia Derbyshire and jazz pianist John Baker. The equipment at their disposal was minimal, to say the least, as Brian recalls. "In the very beginning, Desmond had been given £2000 and the key to 'redundant plant' [the BBC's junk pile] and that was it! The place kept going for years on what we called 'fag-ends and lollipops'. 'Fag-ends' were the bits of unwanted rubbish that other departments had thrown away; 'lollipops' were the much rarer treats that were occasionally sent down to keep Desmond quiet. Like the vocoder, for instance: it was very nice, but we hadn't asked for one and didn't really need it. It was like the icing on a non-existent cake!"

The Workshop's equipment consisted merely of a lot of old tape recorders and a few pieces of test equipment that could make noises. The tape recorders could be used for echo, and reverb was also available — it came from an empty room downstairs with a microphone at one end and a speaker at the other. Maida Vale Studios is an unusual building, long and thin with one of its two floors below ground. The Radiophonic Workshop's rooms were at street level, spanning an extremely long corridor.
One room was occupied by a succession of dedicated engineers who had the tools and the know-how to fix all the broken rubbish that arrived; they also built special equipment to order. First was 'Dickie' Bird; then came Dave Young, and finally 'The Two Rays' (White and Riley). Dave Young started a tradition of visiting the nearby Portobello Market every week to buy bits and pieces for the Workshop, and this continued long after he'd left. In the '60s, a lot of ex-military kit from the war was still being sold off; Dave would return with items such as a genuine aircraft's joystick!

Much of the Workshop's output then was produced simply by using the techniques of musique concr te: natural sounds were recorded and manipulated on tape by editing, pitch-changing, and very often by reversing the tape. There was a standing joke that a Radiophonic composer could enthusiastically churn out original compositions for several years. When the inspiration ran out, all their old tracks could be re-used (and improved?) by playing them backwards!

Wobbulating The World
In the early '60s, synthesizers simply did not exist. Producer Joe Meek was using the monophonic, valve-operated Clavioline but the Radiophonic Workshop, oddly enough, never had one. What they did have, though, was all the test oscillators that they could beg, borrow or steal from other BBC departments. A method was devised for controlling 12 oscillators at a time, triggering them from a tiny home-built keyboard of recycled piano keys. Each oscillator could be independently tuned by means of a range switch and a chunky Bakelite frequency knob.

There was also the versatile 'wobbulator', a sine-wave oscillator that could be frequency modulated. It consisted of a very large metal box, with a few switches and one very large knob in the middle that could sweep the entire frequency range in one revolution. They were used in the BBC for 'calibrating reverb times in studios' apparently. And as far as the Workshop's electronic sound sources went, that was it!
Yet, curiously, it is the work produced in those early years that the Radiophonic Workshop's reputation still hangs on. The Doctor Who theme was first recorded in 1963, and still there are fans who insist that the original is the best of many versions made over the years. What's more, some of the sound effects made for the first series of Doctor Who are still being used! When the newly revamped Doctor Who appeared in 2005, hardcore fans recognised the original effects and wrote to Brian Hodgson: "How nice to hear the old original Dalek Control Room again, after all these years!"


Brian's 'Tardis' sound, dating from 1963, is also still used. "I spent a long time in planning the Tardis sound," says Brian. "I wanted a sound that seemed to be travelling in two directions at once; coming and going at the same time." The sound was actually made from the bare strings of a piano that had been dismantled. Brian scraped along some bass strings with his mum's front-door key, then set about processing the recordings, as he describes it, "with a lot of reverse feedback". (By this, I assume he means that tape echo was added, then the tape reversed so that it played backwards.) Eventually, Brian played the finished results to Dick Mills and Desmond Briscoe; at their insistence he added a slowly rising note, played on the wobbulator.

Working Up A Storm
Brian and Delia Derbyshire were, as he says, "best mates. We used to go on holiday together." In 1966, together with the founder of synth manufacturers EMS, Peter Zinovieff, they formed Unit Delta Plus, a band of sorts, and began performing on London's psychedelic underground scene. As one Workshop member remembers it, "At the end of their day at the BBC they used to race off to the West End, changing into their kaftans in the taxi." Unit Delta Plus split in 1967, but some of their gigs sound like crackers: how about the two-day 'Million Volt Light and Sound Rave' at the Roundhouse? I'm sorry to have missed that one! In 1969 the pair teamed up with David Vorhaus as the White Noise, releasing the cult classic album An Electric Storm.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

British electronic musician Delia Derbyshire

A great find from Audio Lemon:

Amazing 1969 electronica pop from electronic musician/composer Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) as part of the group White Noise. "Love Without Sound" has a startlingly contemporary sound to it, basically sounding like 90s-2000s trip-hop minus the fat beats and contemporary recording technology. This was all done the hard way, with an X-acto knife, tape loops, primitive synthesizers:




And this clip of her beat matching reel to reel loops: