Blog from Kanada

Some people say the Second Life is dull; i.e., there are usually only a few people in the virtual worlds of Linden Lab's Second Life. In "Game scrumble by Kiyoshi Shin" (The "Second Life" that cannot become a Disney Land (August 3, 2007, in Japanese)), Shin wrote that most of the users who logged in to the Second Life were new users, and most of them gave it up after using it only once. It is rather hard for the newcomers to experience interections when they log in because there are few people there. But, in addition, they uses the Second Life only for trial and may have no intension to interact with other people, so I guess they may avoid interaction even if there are other people.

The Schönberg Center in Austria uploaded tens of performance videos of Arnold Schönberg's music and documentary videos to YouTube. Most of the music performances are fragments, but some short pieces are completely included in the videos. "A Survivor from Warsaw" conducted by Holst Stein and "talked" by Herman Prei (by sprech-gesang) is a valuable video to be listened. Not only the performance but also the recording and the images are good.

The Schönberg Center in Austria uploaded fragments of Arnold Schönberg's piano concerto performed by Mitsuko Uchida and a mixture of her talk and performance of the concerto to YouTube. I did not know Uchida had played Schönberg's concerto, but now I know there is a CD (Universal, UCCP1016). The talk is in English and I have not yet understood whole, but I could know how Uchida grasped Schönberg's music, and I was very interested.