My Favorite Music and Apps of 2019

Things have been quiet on the blog lately. My wife and I bought a new house in late October and are expecting our first child any day now. Once I can find some time again, I have some very exciting work I am looking forward to here.

In the meantime I wanted to squeeze in a few annual posts I usually do around this time. I have had plenty of time to reflect this year, just not as much time to write. So my descriptions will be more brief, if not absent. I always find it easier to write about technology because of the matter of fact way I can describe what it does.

Favorite Albums of 2019

Johann Sebastian Bach - Víkingur Ólafsson

The Other Side of Air - Myra Melford's Snowy Egret

Origami Harvest - Ambrose Akinmusire

Vibras - J Balvin

re:member - Ólafur Arnalds

Finding Gabriel - Brad Mehldau

BEAT MUSIC! BEAT MUSIC! BEAT MUSIC! - Mark Guilana

The Fearless Flyers II - EP

Motivational Music for the Syncopated Soul - Cory Wong

Favorite Live Shows

Ghost Note at Creative Alliance - When you take the percussionists from Snarky Puppy, Mono Neon on bass, and other members of the backup band for Prince, you get unbelievably funky.

Nickel Creek/Punch Brothers at Carnegie Hall - Beautiful hall to see two of my all time favorite bands performing together for the first time.

Louis Cole at U Street Music Hall - Just Louis Cole, a MIDI keyboard, drum set, and Logic Pro. It was fun in such an intimate venue to see how he uses Logic to handle all of his arrangement tracks. His keyboard playing was FUNKY and his drumming was technically impressive.

Favorite Apps

Home and home apps - I would consider my current favorite hobby to be automating my home. When we moved to the new house this year, I added some of the following stuff to my home automation setup: smart dimmers for the lights, baseboard thermostats, floodlight cameras, garage door openers, diffusers, smoke detectors, and more. The Apple Home app is my master control center for all of these devices, but I also really like Home+ 4 as it offers a superior and more customizable interface in some respects.

I also love HomeRun for customizing my Apple Watch watch face so that it always knows which scenes I want to run at my house based on time of day.

Peleton - I didn't think this service could be worth the hype but I am really buying in. We have a little bit of space in the new house to lay out some yoga gear and do some body weight working out. We are undecided on the bike so far, but the Peloton app is full of classes for strength, meditation, yoga, functional training, running, biking, and more!

There are always new classes, many are live, and they are highly specific. I can filter 5, 10, 15, and 20 minute classes when I only have a little bit of time. There are restorative yoga classes and body weight strength classes that just need a mat. Best of all, the iPhone app can send to my Apple TV and Apple Watch simultaneously so I can watch the instructor on the big screen and track my heart rate on the watch.

FileMaker - I live by this app. I only know the scripting well enough to program my own keyboard shortcuts. But for tracking students, musical repertoire, assignments, and everything else, this is the power app solution for every problem.

AnyTune Pro+ - This iOS and Mac app has finally replaced Transcribe! for me in most cases. It has great Music app integration, native keyboard shortcuts, and a rich user interface. I love using Downie to take YouTube videos from the internet and then slow them down in AnyTune so that my band students and private percussion students can practice to a superior performance at a reasonable speed.

Timery - This is a super impressive and scriptable time tracking app for iOS that has a great widget and Siri Shortcuts support.

Reeder 4 - Reeder is still the app my thumb reaches for first when I have some free time. I love reading my RSS subscriptions in its clean user interface. Now that it has Instapaper support, I don't need to leave the app to catch up on my read later list.

Cardhop for iOS - This is the contacts app replacement you NEED to install on your iOS devices. It takes the frustration out of adding to and updating your contacts. You must see it to believe it.

IDAGIO - This subscription app and service takes the metadata problem out of classical music by properly tagging composer, arranger, soloist, orchestra, and performer information and allowing it to be filtered. You can filter by year, ensemble, composer, conductor, and even soloist.

GoodNotes for Mac - One of my most used iPad apps is now on the Mac. The Mac version uses Apple's Catalyst technology which allows developers to port iPad apps to the Mac. For this reason it exhibits some weird behaviors. But I don't need to spend tons of time working in it as much as I just need to be able to view my synced documents from a Mac. I use the iPad version to annotate my band seating charts. I write down things about posture, behavior, participation, and then compare it against a weekly rehearsal rubric at the end of every week.

It is a lot easier to input grades into our district's LMS, Canvas, on Mac, so it is helpful to now be able to see my annotated charts on macOS, rather than having my iPad and my Mac open side by side.

Which music and apps were most compelling to you in 2019?

Things might be quiet here for a while longer. In early 2020, I look forward to getting cozier in my new home, and learning what it feels like to be a father. I wish you a great year of music making, with all the best technology tools by your side. Happy New Year!

Favorites of 2018 - Live Music

These posts will never happen if I don’t make it fuss free. So here is it! With little introduction or fanfare, the ‘stuff’ that made up my year. My favorite albums, live shows, apps, and ‘things’ of 2018.

Next up, live music!

Live Shows

The Telluride Bluegrass Festival

Hard to write about this one in few words but I promised myself this would be fuss free. My wife all but dragged me to this festival, affirming all year long that it would be worth the journey. My camping chops are a long way from my Eagle Scout years. Anyway, the memories outlast any annoyance I felt camping at a music festival.

Some of the highlights include:

• Seeing Live From Here with Chris Thile recorded...well, live

• Bela Fleck featuring Brooklyn Rider String Quartet (think Bartok meets late 20th century strings for string quarter and banjo)

• Edgar Meyer and Christian McBride bass duet set

• St. Paul and the Broken Bones

• Sturgil Simpson (always killer)

• Edgar Meyer and his son, George Meyer on the small stage

• Hawktail on the small stage

• I'm With Her, Nightgrass set (You can enter a lottery to get tickets to see certain artists perform at the local opera house in town. I'm With Her sounds stunning around a single mic.)

Punch Brothers at The Telluride Bluegrass Festival

We saw them four times this year if you include three times at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. One of the most memorable of these performances was on the main stage where they debuted their new album, All Ashore, in its entirety. It is a beautiful record and my family will share really special memories of hearing it live with the crisp mountain breeze washing over us.

But perhaps one of the most memorable shows I have ever seen was later that night when Punch Brothers performed a Nightgrass set in town. The band member’s musicianship was on full display. And due to this intimate audience, (and a long weekend of performing tightly organized sets), they let loose a little. They were kicking back Manhattans, lengthening solo sections, and engaging in banter. Things that made their earlier performances memorable for me but that have since become less a part of their live show due to a lengthier song repertoire and wider audience to please.

Let me give you an example. During the solo section of a bluegrass standard, each member completely deconstructed the I-V progression. During the banjo player Noam Pikelne’s solo, he hinted at motif from a song on the new record (in an entirely different key and time signature), and Chris made a gesture to the band. Then somehow they morphed this small suggestion into the entire introduction of the other song, while the bass still wavered between I-V, ultimately transforming completely into a performance of of the entire song, back into a I-V progression, and into more solo’s. Chris Thile’s solo (equally ridiculous) somehow managed to transform into one of the Bach Violin Sonotas, which he performed in its entirety, followed by the band transforming that back into the head of the bluegrass tune they had originally started off with.

As an encore, Chris came out into the center of the audience with Sarah Jarosz, and they sang a few old folk songs together. Chris’s parents were in the balcony, seeing him perform at the festival for the first time together since he was a kid. At one point Chris called out to his father to sing one of the verses with him in harmony. I’m not crying, you’re crying. This was an easy top five-er for me, and a reminder of all the reasons I love Punch Brothers.

The Bad Plus at The Hamilton

I am cheating by including this show. It happened right around the new year, but technically in 2017. The Bad Plus is another artist that has been with me for a while. I learned about them in a formative time of musical discovery, and while their sound has not really evolved in recent records, it was nice to see them on their last tour with Ethan Iverson playing piano. The show was bittersweet. On the one hand, they played a lot of old favorites I had not heard in a while. On the other hand, they seemed kind of done with one another.

Gabriel Kahane at Jammin’ Java

See my tidbit on Gabriel Kahane’s record, ‘Book of Travelers,’ from my recent Favorite Albums of 2018 post. He played most of the album at this show. The venue, Jammin’ Java, was small and quiet. The upright piano was inconsistent and out of tune. I thought the beauty of Kahane’s songs might be disrupted, but this quirky and intimate situation made a perfect frame for the message of Kahane’s songs.

The Centennial High School Wind Ensemble - The Peabody Institute, Miriam A. Friedberg Concert Hall

The Centennial High School Wind Ensemble was invited to perform at The Midwest Clinic this year. This is a point of pride for my teaching community because it takes place in the Howard County Public School System, the district in which I teach. More directly, my school, Ellicott Mills Middle School, is a direct feeder of students into Centennial. Having had the opportunity to work with a small few past EMMS students, and by having a private student of mine in the group, I take serious pride in the accomplishments of Centennial High School’s band program and their director, David Matchim. It was unreal to hear a high school ensemble play an hour of music at the level they did, and in December of the school year! Check out their wind octet below...

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Here is a clip of Centennial High School’s Woodwind Octet sounding absolutely BOSS. What a pleasure it was on Thursday night to hear both Ellicott Mills students and private students displaying the best of student musicianship that Maryland has to offer.

A post shared by Robby Burns (@_robbyburns) on Dec 15, 2018 at 6:39am PST

NPR’s The 50 Best Albums of 2018 - Apple Music and Spotify Playlist

Happy holidays! A tradition six years in the making has come around again.

NPR has released their list of the 50 Best Albums of 2018, and again, I have compiled it into an Apple Music playlist.

I used to do this playlist in Spotify and did not for the first time last year. By popular request, I was prepared to do it in both Apple Music and Spotify this year but found that NPR had already published the list in Spotify! I still had to make it in Apple Music (what does that say about AM?) which I wanted to do anyway because this is tradition now. So here it is. Ready to take you soaring in to the new year, I present to you a playlist of NPR’s 50 Best Albums of the Year.

From NPR:

Art is identity, scream these best albums of 2018. Even when it's pure invention. The most striking things we heard this year mined personal experiences that could feel intimate as whispers or bold and overstuffed as superhero science fiction. Even in an era where listeners have been primed for the unexpected, genuine surprises arrived steadily across the last 12 months – a cascade of introductions, breakthroughs, revelations and rebirths to reward whatever precious attention you could give. (Not a huge surprise: Most of them, after the votes from our staff and member station partners were tallied, turned out to have been made by women.) We're happy to share NPR Music's list of the 50 best albums of 2018. You can listen to them here and hear a discussion on the year in music on All Songs Considered. We'll have lots more before the year ends.

NPR’s 50 Best Albums of the Year - Spotify Playlist

NPR’s 50 Best Albums of the Year - Apple Music Playlist

I direct you now to last year’s version of this post where I highlight some of my favorites albums from these lists over the past five years.

Favorites from this year's list include:

The Other Side of Air | Myra Melford's Snowy Egret

Víkingur Ólafsson | Johann Sebastian Bach

Kamashi Washington | Heaven And Earth

Janelle Monáe | Dirty Computer

Enjoy!