About 20 years ago I went to the Proms, a yearly event at Albert Hall in London where a fairly eclectic selection of music (mainly classical) is performed. That year there was the world premiere of a piece of amazing music I now know is called “Nachruf for Strings” by a Norwegian composer (“nachruf”, I am told, means “obituary” in Norwegian).
I remembered the piece a few days ago and e-mailed the Norwegian Society of Composers to see if I could learn more. In 24 hours I got a reply from a very helpful gentleman named Thorgrim who asked another chap named Torkild who came up not only with the correct name of the piece but also the composer’s name, Arne Nordheim, and a Web site where I could purchase it.
The site for acquiring this gem is Norsk Komponist Forening, a showcase for Norwegian music that is varied and prolific. Thus it was that I found there before me, ready to be mine, all seven minutes and 28 seconds of “Nachruf for Strings” for the princely sum of 13.50 Kroner (about US$2.24).
I clicked on the “Buy” icon and got “We’re sorry…Your PC does not seem to be configured to handle encrypted WMA files.” Allow me to translate: “We’re sorry, but we’re using Microsoft Digital Rights Management, which requires Internet Explorer, which you apparently aren’t using so we can’t help you.”
They were right: I use Firefox. The requirement for IE was irritating but not a real problem. I ran up IE and found the track, added it to my basket, and then found out they wouldn’t accept charges less than 35NKr ($5.81). OK, so I found another Nordheim composition so I was over the minimum and completed the purchase.
After downloading the tracks I tried to play them in Windows Media Player and got a warning dialog. But the dialog was in Norwegian and, as you might guess, my Norwegian is a little, er, nonexistent. But there was a link to click on. This gave me another warning in Norwegian. I discovered there is a bug in Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 11. The support document titled “BUG: You may be redirected to a Web page when you try to play Windows Media DRM protected content after you upgrade to Windows Media Player 11 or to Windows Vista,” and dated Feb. 7, offered a way to address the problem. So, I downloaded a patch from Microsoft, installed it, restarted WMP, and voil
