media report

1. Is it by Brahms? Read. Listen.
I'll go along with the critic so far as to agree that it certainly sounds like Brahms, but not that the alternative has to be "a completely unknown composer." I'm not the first one to suggest: what about Brahms's friend Albert Dietrich? Here's some Dietrich for comparison.

2. A silent film (with period music) on the manufacture of books in 1925, taken at the printing facilities of the Oxford University Press (the Clarendon Press, in Jericho, Oxford).
What's particularly interesting is the combination of tasks rather fearsomely automated with those still requiring painstaking hand work. (And the bizarrely rigid sex segregation thereof.) Any old-time SF fanzine fan will heave a sigh of recognition at 11:00: they're collating!

3. We're up for the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address next week, so here it is.
Listen: Read by Stephen Colbert. Read by every celebrity Ken Burns could get, backed by Ken Burns music. Read by somebody who really knows how to read it.
Read: As if it were written by George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin. And a classic: as if Eisenhower had written it. Finally, As Abraham Lincoln wrote it.

4. Just read: announcement of the death of John Tavener, British composer of "holy minimalist" sacred choral music without parallel. Here's a work of his.