The Marxophone is a fretless zither that has four sets of chord strings to be strummed with the left hand and two octaves of double melody strings, which are struck by metal hammers activated by the right hand. The hammers are mounted on spring steel and produce a mandolin-like sound from repeated bouncing on the strings, hence the name mandolin-guitar-zither sometimes applied to the Marxophone. The sound of the Marxophone is also reminiscent of the various types of hammered dulcimer in music traditions world-wide.

In addition to being a renowned new music pianist, Margaret Leng Tan is the foremost specialist at the toy piano. She has concertized worldwide with her miniature instruments, bestowing them with serious music status in repertoire both written for her and arrangements. For this disc of attractive yet challenging music, Ms. Tan performs Cage’s classic “Suite for Toy Piano” plus her arrangement of Cage’s seminal “Dream” for toy & grand piano (a work that foreshadowed new age music); and her arrangement for voice and toy instruments of a recent song by George Crumb.

PopClip appears when you select text with your mouse in any app. Instantly access context-specific actions including cut, copy and paste. If you select text containing a URL, email address or file path, PopClip can open it. Select a misspelled word, and PopClip offers corrections. Select any text to do a web search with those terms, or select a single word to get the dictionary definition.

Create dazzling 3D titles for your videos with BluffTitler DX9. Want to impress your friends and clients with cool 3D titles? But don't want to spend a fortune on professional 3D animation and video titling software? BluffTitler is the easiest way to add spectacular 3D text animations to your photos and videos! Other 3D programs always seemed too hard to learn and too expensive to justify. But thanks to BluffTitler, I can finally create all of the cool animations I only dreamed of before!

WM Recorder is the easiest, most powerful way to record millions of video and audio files from the internet. Just open WM Recorder, play your video or audio, and it's saved automatically.

Techsmith Snagit - The award-winning screen-capture software. Using SnagIt, you can select and capture anything on your screen, then easily add text, arrows, or effects, and save the capture to a file or share it immediately by e-mail or IM. Capture and share an article, image, or Web page directly from your screen. Or, capture and share any part of any application that runs on your PC. Automatically save in one of 23 file formats, or send to the printer, to your e-mail, or to the clipboard.

If we go with Aristotle's definition of genius – as the ability to perceive and create metaphors – then composer Harrison Birtwistle is most certainly a titan of the mind, and Earth Dances may be his Olympus. Throughout his long career, Birtwistle has created almost as many metaphors as musical works; his titles, his schemes, the imaginary networks of means and ends which his art erects – these metaphor-webs yield an oeuvre in their own right. And in Earth Dances, Birtwistle's nearly forty-minute work for huge orchestra from 1986, these metaphors collect and converge, lie upon one another as a lifetime's accumulated strata. All Birtwistle's best allegories and tropes are here: the line, the labyrinth, the town and landscape, the globe's surface and the Deist machine, the music of a new mythology. It should therefore be no surprise that Earth Dances is one of Birtwistle's most demanding scores ……..
From Allmusic

The second son of Martín García de Anchieta and Urtayzaga de Loyola, who was a great-aunt of the future saint, Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, members of a leading family in the Basque country, Juan de Anchieta was born in 1462 near Azpeitia in Guipúzcoa in the Iraurgui valley. Although there is no information about his formative years, it is possible that he served as a chorister in the chapel of Henry IV of Castile and perhaps studied at Salamanca University, where Diego de Fermoselle, an elder brother of Juan del Encina, taught. In 1489 he was appointed as a singer in the Court Chapel of Queen Isabella the Catholic, with a salary of 20,000 maravedís, increased in 1493 to 30,000 maravedís. In 1495 he was appointed maestro di capilla to the Prince Don Juan. After the death of the Prince in 1497 he returned to the service of the Queen, to be ……
From Naxos