A little glass vial?

A little glass vial!

Tom Smith, the World’s Fastest Filker, tore his left quad tendon the other day, and as I understand it, doesn’t have much in the way of insurance. He has a Virtual Guitar Case that’s been set up on his site for a while: if you can, go over and drop something in. Even better, order his CDs. I especially recommend the downloads for Homecoming: Marcon 2005 and Live at GAFilk: those may have been the best $9.98 I ever spent.

Ars Technica points at MusOpen.com, which is dedicated to public domain classical music. Besides scores, they take bids on performances: when the performance is fully funded, they record the piece and release it into the public domain.

Neat concept, but there are other places like Mutopia, which have much larger collections of sheet music, along with the Lilypond source files, so you can format them any way you want. There are also sites like the Wikimedia Commons, which have their own music libraries. We’ll have to see how this plays out.

Well, I suppose if you’re a bass clarinet quartet, that’s the only kind you can play. :-)

I consider it a major blow to my geek cred that I never memorized Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements”. Oh, well. At least I have this Flash animation to console me…

Again, I <3 The Onion.

Sousaphone Hero offers two dozen public-domain marches, including 1893’s “The Liberty Bell,” 1896’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and 1897’s “Entry of the Gladiators.” The bulky sousaphone-shaped controller coils around the body, and players wear white spat-like foot coverings fitted with sensors that monitor synchronized marching steps. As with the fret buttons on Guitar Hero’s guitar peripheral, the sousaphone controller’s three valves are color-coded to match on-screen notes the player must hit.

Players may also choose from 27 different fat-guy characters who can be customized with Alpine hats, epaulets, and a mustache editor with a wide array of options.

Johnny Depp. Helena Bonham Carter. Alan Rickman.

Sweeney Todd.

David@BoingBoing points us at a CD of orchestras warming up before performances. Neat. (h/t to Bloggity again)

Laura also links to a post containing 10 of the best music videos of the 80s.

At a recent concert by Great Big Sea, Alan Doyle swiped the camera of a woman in the front row, filming her and some of his bandmates before returning the camera for the end of the song. :-)

Edit: belated hat tip to Anna.