This is my response to spending well over an hour trying to hunt down mp3s of some Dowland songs I'm trying to study. OMG. WTF? I've heard some very strange things passing as professional recordings of this stuff. One included someone who sounded as if they were either being tortured, or in the throws of passion. ACK.

OK, I'm no professional recording artist, but do these people have no shame? Some of them clearly aren't trying for anything like a period performance. A couple that were sounded awful - the lute and voice only agreeing on some of the notes. Ick ick ick! BTW, this was all on Amazon and iTunes - two places you don't find a whole lot of "amature" music, unless you're listening to someone's pod cast.

*sigh* When I got the Sting album, I thought his performances passible. It was making the music more accessible to the masses, by having a pop star sing it. OY. Turns out, the thing is worth more to me than I thought. At least Sting doesn't sound like a pompus operatic tenor, trying to sing music his voice just seems too big for... and doing so at the speed of a funeral dirge.

Ok, end of rant. Back to trying to find a recording that isn't revolting...

UPDATE - I found some. I was specifically looking for three songs:
The Lowest Trees Have Tops
Clear or Cloudy
Wilt Thou Unkind

Yeah, at A's elementary school, I've been involved with a controversy!

The book in question, "The Golden Compass: a Movie Book" is a watered down, Reader's Digest for Kids version of the MOVIE. Not the original novel. Apparently, the original book is controversial. I haven't read it, so I wouldn't know. In any case, a teacher at the school came to the folks running the fair, and told them that she thought they ought to just pull the book, because she'd heard bad things about it in an email someone sent her. Are you following this? In other words, "someone told me that someone else said that it was bad, so I think it's bad, so you should think it's bad." Oy. And this is someone teaching?

So, the discussion starts. While they're discussing with the principle (who's in the unenviable position of having to do something about this), I scan the book. None of the "bad things" mentioned in the previous conversation (which I got second hand, so it needed some serious review) were in the book. *LOL* I hand the book to the principle and say, "I don't even see a mention of said bad things. But you ought to read it, just to make sure." The teacher who raised the issue in the first place is, of course, not available for comment, having dropped her bomb and left to go teach. *LOL*

I wound up in a nice discussion of censorship, the press, and other things with one of the guys who works for the local paper (which can be a total rag) and who has a child at our school. His wife is running said book fair. We were all just flabbergasted. Let the parents sort out what they don't want their kids to read. Then the librarian tells us that a new book out about penguins, which has won children's lit awards, etc, is being protested by some because they feel that the theme of a father raising a child raises issues of homosexuality. I nearly laughed myself silly. How sad - penguins raise their young that way, it's their nature, and yet people have to put their human spin on it. Yikes.

So, I can't wait until the day one of these ultraconservative nuts sees the pile of books at my house. They'll probably die of heart failure on the spot, or use some sign against evil and run. *LOL*