Instrumentation

The Morris Township, N.J.-based company said it is selling off the units that comprise its electronics and instrumentation sector so that it can focus on its automotive, aerospace and engineered materials businesses. A spokesman said the company hopes to get about $1.5 billion by selling: Ampex Corp., Amphenol Products, Linotype Group and the Engineered Components Group businesses, including MPB Corp., Neptune International and Sigma Instrument.

Teams will fan out across the Sierra Nevada on Thursday to perform their final snow survey of the season, a closely watched rite of spring that helps determine how much water will flow to farms and cities in coming months. But 18,000 feet above the Sierra slopes, an airborne experiment is underway that could revolutionize that ritual. Starting in early April, researchers have made weekly flights over the upper Tuolumne River basin, taking sophisticated instrument readings of the snow depth and reflected sunlight.

Charles H. Colvin, an early aeronautics industry figure who designed and installed some of the instrumentation and gauges in Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, is dead at age 92. Colvin, who two years after Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic sold his Pioneer Instruments Co. to the Bendix Corp., died earlier this month at a hospital near his retirement home in Ojai. He was born in Sterling, Mass., educated at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.

Janos Starker, a renowned concert cellist as well as a distinguished teacher and recording artist, died Sunday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 88 and had been in declining health. Since 1958, Starker had been a professor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. The university announced his death. Starker's cello seminars attracted students from all over the world. "I personally cannot perform without teaching, and I cannot teach without performing," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1993.

Alex MacDonald has been named vice president and controller at Interstate Electronics Corp. in Anaheim. The company said that he will take on the duties that were performed by Jack Resor, who recently retired as vice president for administration and finance. MacDonald joined the company 23 years ago as assistant controller and eventually worked into his current position as controller. He will continue to work in that capacity in addition to performing his new duties.

"URBAN BEACHES." Cactus World News. MCA. If this Irish quartet throws in a dash of U2-esque instrumentation here and there, perhaps it can be forgiven--after all, Bono Hewson did give the Cacti their first big break by producing the soaring single "The Bridge." That song is a tantalizing burst of this band at its best. Bold, brash guitars crash and howl with melodic fury as Eion McEvoy's keening voice chronicles hope overcoming despair.

The Pittsburgh-based company said it has agreed to acquire the worldwide medical electronics units of Honeywell Inc. and Litton Industries. The move into the high-technology instrumentation business will cost PPG up to $100 million. PPG will buy the Pleasantville, N.Y.

David Benoit's Wiltern Theatre concert Friday night was a classic illustration that music can have rhythm and momentum and still be completely lacking in swing. Performing with four horns, a four-man rhythm team and a string quartet, Benoit had plenty of instrumentation. But the strings were relegated to playing sax-section-like block harmonies, the horns were blurred into musical mud by the sound mix, and the rhythms were only a mild improvement over drum machine funk.

Both discs from these Italian period-performance bands contain seven of Vivaldi's descriptive concertos, some of which overlap--or do they? For instance, each disc includes a "La Notte" Concerto with different catalog numbers, in different keys, yet they are indeed the same piece, albeit one with a recorder lead and the other for strings and harpsichord only. However, another title, "La tempesta di mare," is given to very different concertos on each disc, in content as well as instrumentation.

The Barry Manilow of the 1970s was a crooner of the kind of saccharine ballads best played as background music while reading Harlequin romance novels. But on Friday, in the first of two nights at the Pacific Amphitheatre, melancholy Manilow was upstaged by bouncy Barry, ersatz purveyor of pulsating pop that's better for aerobic dancing than soft lights and romancing.

Drawn to imaginative ideas about sound and pitch, musician and composer Dean Drummond found the traditional instruments of European classical music inadequate to perform the seemingly "out of tune" intervals of microtonal music. So he followed the lead of his mentor - iconoclastic American composer Harry Partch - and invented instruments that would produce a complete palette of tonal pitches. The music makers were known by such fittingly unconventional names as the zoomoozophone and juststrokerods.

WILLITS, Calif. - We've heard a lot in this post-Newtown moment about how California leads the nation in gun laws. But you probably haven't heard the unlikely story of Brandon Maxfield, a quadriplegic 26-year-old who helped drive a notorious segment of California's gun industry toward extinction. "It wouldn't have happened without him," said Garen Wintemute, a UC Davis professor of emergency medicine whose anti-gun advocacy has made him a firearms industry nemesis. In 1994, at the age of 7, Brandon was accidentally shot through the neck with a .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

Beto Cuevas already is a rock star, a poet and a pop-culture idol in his native Chile. So what does he really want to do? Paint. The former lead singer for the band La Ley, from the late '80s to the early 2000s, and subsequently a successful solo artist, Cuevas is among South American rock's most durable talents. He's still recording, and he's a regular fixture at Latin music awards shows. PHOTOS: Iconic rock guitars and their owners But according to a story in the Mexico City newspaper El Universal, Cuevas is eager for his fans to see another side of him, as a visual artist who has accumulated a trove of paintings and drawings over the years.

This is wild. Musician J. Viewz goes to the market, buys some random vegetables -- eggplant, mushrooms, grapes, carrots -- and wires them up as MIDI instruments.  Then he sets about performing a vegetable kingdom version of Massive Attack's “Teardrop,” which you can watch on his YouTube video . To note: J. Viewz is actually the stage name of electronic music producer Jonathan Dagan. Via Freunde von Freunden . ALSO: A voyeuristic view into strangers' refrigerators 5 Questions for Mattew Dickson 5 great beer stores you should know about Twitter.com/sirenevirbila

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. - The piano was delivered to its bluff-top perch under cover of fog nearly two weeks ago. It is scheduled to leave this coastal enclave in a burst of flames on Sunday. In between the fog and the fire, musician and sculptor Mauro Ffortissimo has been treating his neighbors to an illicit outdoor concert series grandly dubbed Sunset Piano. Chopin, Debussy, a tango or two. The performances are timed to end the moment the sun sinks below the horizon. He plays to cyclists and dog walkers, babies in strollers, his landlady in a folding chair, the charmed, the perplexed.

Paul Tanner, a trombonist with the Glenn Miller Orchestra who became a prominent jazz educator at UCLA and created an unusual electronic musical instrument heard on the Beach Boys' classic 1966 hit "Good Vibrations," has died. He was 95. Tanner died of pneumonia Tuesday at an assisted-living facility near his home in Carlsbad, Calif., said his wife, Jan. Tanner was a member of the Miller Orchestra, one of the best-known swing bands of the 1930s and '40s, for most of the orchestra's existence of less than a decade.

Never underestimate the power of the salsa. That was the lesson to be learned on Sunday, the third of the Queen Mary Jazz Festival's four days. With five of the seven main attractions partially or entirely dominated by Latin rhythms, the crowd occupied about 90% of the 7,400 seats in the dock area. Mainstays of the 7 1/2-hour presentation were the bands of Poncho Sanchez, Mongo Santamaria and Tito Puente. Their instrumentation is roughly the same: three horns, three percussion, piano and bass.

California's yearlong obsession with economic whiners and losers has culminated in the bizarre selection of Wilford D. Godbold Jr. as chairman of the state Chamber of Com merce. Godbold's chief claim to fame is having moved the bulk of his business to Utah, while selling off much of its technology to the Japanese. But there is a less bizarre side to the state's economic story.

Downtown L.A.'s Staples Center may be home to the Grammys, but it's a relatively nondescript industrial complex in Burbank that's attracting some of the awards show's most notable nominees this week. Fender Musical Instruments' new artist showroom has become a hub for well-known musicians of all stripes. And with the Grammy Awards scheduled to air Sunday, business is brisk. Just as dress designers clamor to get their gowns on Oscar contenders, makers of musical equipment such as Fender are doing their best to get their newest products in the hands of Grammy-nominated pop stars.

Evelyn Freeman, a pioneer in the field of aging who in the twilight of her life helped people cope with the challenges of getting older, has died. She was 96. Freeman, who was the longtime director of the senior counseling program at what was then called the Center for Healthy Aging in Santa Monica, died Jan. 14 of old age at her Brentwood home, her close friend Antoinette O'Connor said. Freeman was instrumental in adapting peer counseling techniques for seniors facing the difficult issues of aging, such as losing loved ones, isolation and stress from chronic pain.