Glenn Gould Playing the Goldberg Variations. It's 47 minutes long, but you may find it difficult to stop.

Goldberg Variations

What was I doing on July 6, 1957, when 15-year-old Paul McCartney went along to hear 16-year-old John Lennon performing with his band at a church f�te in Liverpool?
...
When I was young, I worshiped George Gershwin and Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers. I never in my wildest dreams imagined I would work alongside talent that could equal those giants of popular song. But along came John Lennon and Paul McCartney and my life was changed. Of course they leaned on me and worked me to death, but it was so worthwhile, and they still preserved that cheeky charm that had me hooked at the start.

George Martin remembers

P.S. We love you too - International Herald Tribune

It is 50 years since the legendary first meeting of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, and a cynic might be forgiven for wondering why anybody cares.

The birth of the Beatles - International Herald Tribune

In the United States and Britain his most loyal audience tends to be gay men, teenagers and mother-daughter fans. (Several sets turned up at Barnes & Noble.) “There’s a tinge of sadness to their devotion,” he said. “It relates with the alienation that I bring up. So I still feel somewhat subversive, which is nice.”

well i'm not gay, a teenager or a mother-daughter
but i'm certainly a fan of his album Want One
and I think i have an affinity with alienation
so *shrug* so I would say Rufus is *in a Rufus tone the way he says it at the end of Vicious World* "super"

Rufus Wainwright - Music - New York Times

Yes, it's been 40 years exactly since Sgt. Pepper, having labored the previous 20 years teaching his band to play, arranged for its debut in full psychedelic regalia.
...
Great songs seem as though they've always existed, that they weren't written by anyone. Figuring out why some songs and not others stick in our heads, and why we can enjoy certain songs across a lifetime, is the work not just of composers but also of psychologists and neuroscientists. Every culture has its own music, every music its own set of rules. Great songs activate deep-rooted neural networks in our brains that encode the rules and syntax of our culture's music. Through a lifetime of listening, we learn what is essentially a complex calculation of statistical probabilities (instantiated as neural firings) of what chord is likely to follow what chord and how melodies are formed.

Skillful composers play with these expectations, alternately meeting and violating them in interesting ways. In my laboratory, we've found that listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as eating chocolate, having sex or taking opiates. There really is a sex, drugs and rock-and-roll part of the brain: a network of neural structures including the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala. But no one song does this for everyone, and musical taste is both variable and subjective

Daniel J. Levitin - It Was 40 Years Ago Today - washingtonpost.com

i grew up with punk, ska and two-tone
was introduced to Hendrix, Dead Kennedys etc
i found that I loved the tension between noise, discord and melody
the sweet and the sour (to reference Vanilla Sky and it's Spanish original)
introduced to Radiohead, Foo Fighters

40 is on the horizon (18 months or so) and i'm exploring jazz
it has melody it has discord it has pain it has beauty

YouTube - Cantaloupe Island

Katharine Hepburn, who demolished brontosaurus skeletons and male egos in "Bringing Up Baby" and held her own with the King of England in "The Lion in Winter," would have been 100 this past weekend. When she died four years ago at 96, she was hailed as an American icon, celebrated for her strength and independence.

But there was another side to Hepburn, too - more vulnerable, conflicted and ambitious than we knew. Though she liked to appear indifferent to vulgar stardom, she worked hard - very hard - for fame. And she never stopped, enduring fickle tastes and changing times because her desire to be great never waned. While she made us believe she was somehow above Hollywood hoopla, the truth was that long before stars employed staffs to micromanage and refine their public images, Hepburn was inventing a path for others to follow.

a true Hollywood legend and by far my favourite actress

Hepburn, revisited - International Herald Tribune

A musician without peer and passionate advocate of political freedom, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was a citizen of the world, though often unwelcome in his Russian homeland.

played some mean Bach

Legendary cellist Rostropovich dies at 80

By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

Joshua Bell graces the DC Metro, and almost no one notices. This is an amazing read.

Pearls Before Breakfast - washingtonpost.com

Having vowed never to record again, one of pop's most lauded singer-songwriters, Joni Mitchell, is returning with a new album this year. A tribute album is also due for release and Radio 2 was recently granted a rare interview. Is this the resurfacing of just another rock relic or that rare event: a comeback worth waiting for?

Joni Mitchell is a goddess

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Joni Mitchell - why the fuss?