Flea Market and New Merchandise Update

?Always keep a song in your heart – it’s like karaoke for the voices in your head?

-Robert Fulton Abernethy

Music has been part of the development of every culture in the world. People had few forms of entertainment and song and dance were the biggest among them.

Karaoke came into existence in Japan in the early 1970?s when a group of businessmen asked popular nightclub performer Daisuke Inoue to make recordings of his songs for their entertainment. Since what they were really interested in was singing along, these businessmen also asked him to remove the singing from the songs and then display the lyrics. With some insight, Inoue realized that this could actually be a good business opportunity and he invented the first karaoke machine. This was actually a tape recorder that allowed people to play a song after accepting a hundred yen coin. Moreover, Inoue did not sell these tapes; instead, he rented them out. Although this amount was entirely too expensive for the Japanese, the trend caught on.

Karaoke started as supplementary entertainment, the kind placed as an alternative to drinking and eating. Machines were placed in hotels, parks, and restaurants for this very purpose. It took a few years for karaoke to come into its own, and when it did, it took an inescapable grip on the populace. The first sort of karaoke bars was a small booth with a karaoke machine and was referred to as a karaoke box. This could be rented on hourly basis to small groups for private entertainment. These developments took place even before karaoke had become popular recreation in western nations and karaoke boxes continue to be popular places in Japan. The karaoke bar, in its modern form came in to being when karaoke finally reached the west. The trend spread like wildfire. Soon, nightclubs, lounges, cafés, and restaurants in the US and Canada had shipped in karaoke machine for customer entertainment.

The latest karaoke machine use all sorts of media formats to play karaoke music. There are VCD and DVD versions that have become popular for household entertainment as well. Daisuke Inoue won the IgNoble Award in the year 2004 for ?providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other?.

In late 1991, an unknown band from Seattle released their first album, “Nevermind”. The first track on that album was, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. I’m sure not even frontman for the group, Kurt Cobain saw,”Teen Spirit” becoming the anthem for a whole new musical and cultural movement, that would become known as, ‘Grunge’.

The Grunge movement originated in the city of Seattle, Wa.. The look was youthful, minimum wage working class. Long hair, goatees, t-shirts with plaid over-shirts, and torn jeans. The music was loud, heavy, and a little on the dark side.

Many bands from the Seattle area came along with the movement, with names like, ‘Collective Soul’, ‘Stone Temple Pilots’, and ‘Soundgarden’. But the two bands that stood out at the top of the totem-pole were, of course, Nirvana and ‘Pearl Jam’. Pearl Jam’s debut album, Ten, was released in August of 1991. With deep-voiced, hard singing front-man, Eddie Vedder, the album produced three hits, “Alive”, “Even Flow”, and the thought provoking, “Jeremy”, about a boy, (the title character), who is bullied and harassed at school until he lashes out violently against all of his fellow classmates. The video for the song became a fan favorite and was one of the most played on Mtv in 1992. As for some of the other bands that shined in this genre, ‘Collective Soul’ hit the pop charts with “World I Know” and “Run”, a track from the movie soundtrack for “Varsity Blues”.

The song, ‘Plush’,became a chart hitter for the ‘Stone Temple Pilots’. The band, ‘Blind Melon’, with their melodic, offbeat, but very like-able tune, “No Rain”, became the groups one and only hit. On the flip-side, there was ‘Soundgarden’s’ dark and foreboding, “Black Hole Sun”. The song-title says it all, but still entertaining. Even the established and successful, R.E.M., jumped on the grunge bandwagon with their haunting and almost hypnotic song, “Drive”.

But tragedy would strike that would arguably mean a death-nail for Grunge. On April 8, 1994, the body of Kurt Cobain would be found at his Seattle, Washington home by an employee of an electric company who had come out to Kobain’s residence to install security lighting.

Cobain had just gotten out of rehab for a heroin addiction he’d been battling since before Nirvana became famous. Upon his release from rehab, wife, Courtney Love described the artist as “suicidal” and “deeply depressed.” Cobain was discovered in a spare room above the garage of his home. With a shotgun lying across his body, a gunshot wound to his face, and a suicide note just a few feet away, the final ruling from authorities was indeed suicide. Murder theories arose however, but the performer’s medical examiner and homicide detectives that worked the case, all state that the evidence points to the fact that Cobain died by his own hand. The note that was found contained info about the singer’s immediate future plans. Such as, leaving wife, Love and the music business. Then, the last lines of the note spoke of suicide being the only way out for the troubled star.

Thousands of devoted fans saw Kurt Cobain as an iconic figure who had ushered in the Grunge movement. Sadly and inevitably, when he died, Grunge died with him. Bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Stone Temple Pilots, carried on, but by mid 1996, it was evident that Grunge had peaked and was now spiraling towards the history books. Like the rain-drenched city of it’s birth, Grunge was kind of that way. The clouds of Grunge came and brought the rain with it. Then, it rained that day, the next day, and the day after that. Then the rain stopped. The music will live on.

Thousands of beloved pieces of Christian music are free, largely because they are now in the public domain, which in the United States means they were written before 1923 (everywhere else, a safe rule is to make sure the author has been dead for one hundred years, or since 1908). Two web sites, ChoralWiki and The Cyber Hymnal, contain thousands of public domain pieces that are free for immediate download.

The Cyber Hymnal contains more than 7,000 hymns and carols. Most of them are in English, but there are hymns either original to or translated into languages from Afrikaans to Zulu. If you are planning to do Christian service in another country, this is your place to pick up songsheets for “Amazing Grace” and similarly well-known hymns in a variety of languages.

The Cyber Hymnal can be searched by title, by hymn tune, or by letter of the alphabet. If you wanted to search for “Holy, Holy, Holy,” you can do so by its name, in the results for the letter H, or by the name of the tune (“Nicaea”). When you reach the page, you will hear a MIDI of the tune playing, you will see pictures of the hymn’s authors, and you can read brief information about the hymns. Some hymns have quite a bit of biographical information on the authors, history of the hymns, or links to alternate tunes for the hymn.

If you spend a lot of time searching The Cyber Hymnal, you will see that some tunes have been used for multiple hymns — “Nicaea” is indeed the tune for “Holy, Holy, Holy,” but it is also the tune for “God Most High, We Praise You,” which is a newer hymn donated into the public domain by a living composer. The reverse is also true; some hymns have had multiple tunes attached to them. The Cyber Hymnal makes for excellent one-stop shopping; you can find a hymn, learn its history, and pick the tune you want to download.

The only tiny hassle is this: since The Cyber Hymnal has so many tunes and hymns or carols that are interchangeable, it does not have the words and music in one piece of sheet music. You have to copy and paste the words (instant songsheets, at least) and download the tune separately — and the tunes are not in the handy PDF form we all know and love. To download these tunes you will first have to download a piece of free software known as the Noteworthy Composer Viewer, which you can link to through the Cyber Hymnal web site. It is a tiny hassle, but for 7,000 public domain hymns, that’s no big deal!

The second excellent site for more public domain hymns and carols, along with sacred choral works, is ChoralWiki. ChoralWiki has about 10,000 choral works; recent searches I’ve done showed more than 200 Christmas carols (it is close to that time of year again) and more than 200 hymns.

But the great strength of ChoralWiki is in its selection of larger choral works. You can find the complete Messiah by Handel, and several versions of the “Hallelujah” chorus. You can find Mendelssohn’s Elijah as well. A great host of anthems, choruses, selections from oratorios and liturgical works in several languages are available for immediate download.

ChoralWiki is best searched by title (if you know what you are looking for), by composer, or by type of work. Alphabetical search is often ineffective due to the number of ChoralWiki’s selections. Most often you will find your results downloadable in PDF format, with the occasional GIF thrown in. ChoralWiki hosts most of its music on its own site; occasionally it will refer you to outside collections, but this gives you a chance to access hundreds of pieces in addition to the ones at ChoralWiki itself.

If you are looking for a piece of gospel or contemporary music in the public domain, there unfortunately is very little in ChoralWiki or The Cyber Hymnal — or in the public domain, period. Most music we consider contemporary today will not enter the public domain until very late in this century, unless individual composers decide to put their works into the public domain. And gospel music did not really come into its own until the 1930s, with Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Precious Lord” often credited as being the beginning of the genre. But consider how “Precious Lord” shares a remarkable tune similarity with the older hymn “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone,” think of the available hymns and choral works written before 1923 as an opportunity for you to do some arranging! Also, you can find a number of the immediate forerunners to gospel music; both The Cyber Hymnal and ChoralWiki have their share of Negro Spirituals.

Free public domain Christian music is readily available on the Web — two good sites to find thousands of public domain hymns, carols, and choral works are The Cyber Hymnal, with some 7,000 hymns, and ChoralWiki, with some 10,000 choral pieces in total. You can find them at http://www.hymntime.com/tch and http://www.choralwiki.org Happy hunting (and arranging when necessary)!