You Can Leave Your Hat On
If you haven’t read Galen’s rather lengthy piece called Imprecations and Exhortations: A Rather Lengthy Defense of Richard Taruskin over in the Composers Forum, you should do so immediately. I’ve…
Did You Ever Go Clear?
Translating pop music into more ambitious musical forms is a risky business that sometimes produces surprising results. Who would have guessed, for example, that Twyla Tharp’s recycling of Billy Joel’s songs to tell the central story…
Sure It’s a Commie Front, But NPR Rules
The big news today is that NPR and 12 NPR Member stations are launching NPR Music, a free, comprehensive multimedia music discovery Web site, that features on-air and online content…
Dispatch from Tenri: The Kenners
The versatile performing duo known as “The Kenners” played a terrific concert Saturday night at the Tenri Cultural Institute. The program featured works by Charles Wuorinen, Toru Takemitsu, and Jason…
A Rose By Any Other Name
There was a terrific profile of Gil Rose, Music Director of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and of BMOP itself in Sunday’s Boston Globe. If you don’t know BMOP you’re…
Marco Antonio Mazzini Plays Alex Shapiro’s “Deep”
For your Thursday dining and dancing pleasure: [youtube]ARqKIw3vV3E[/youtube]
Halloween Spooks Outside My Window
Today’s assignment: the perfect ghosts and goblins playlist.
Serenading the Glorious Leader
The New York Philharmonic is thinking of visiting North Korea next year and that has caused a great deal of tut-tutting from the nuke ’em, don’t serenade ’em crowd. The conservative position was captured…
Somebody didn’t get the memo
The biggest shock of the day was reading in the NYTimes Book Review a review by Pankaj Mishra of Coltrane: The Story of a Sound by Ben Ratliff, the following…