From the category archives:
I am finally reading Oliver Sacks’ terrific MUSICOPHILIA. It has truly been a life-changing read. In it, he discusses musical hallucinations. I had always assumed that everyone had a constant playlist going in their heads as I do, but I guess not. My brain is full of earworms as well as an enormous playlist of [...]
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It occurred to me to look back at the top selling singles from the past 60 years in increments of 10 years. I’ll bring this to my class and use these songs for analysis and discussion. Questions: why do you think this song was so popular? What is unique about this song? What is the [...]
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Last night, sitting around on the porch shooting the breeze with Gareth’s dad (Gareth and Jenny are getting married today), he spoke of his love for the blues scene in London in the late 60s. I told him that I had just taught the 12-bar blues form to my students this week. He continued to [...]
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It occurs to me as I watch many musicians perform expressively, that this behavior might be perceived as a similar act to being erotic with one’s lover. The caress of a breast, the touch of a finger on a key; the approach of a kiss, raising your instrument high in the air and letting the [...]
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There are three types of requiems: a Type One requiem is performed by a symphony orchestra with chorus and soloists as a part of an orchestra or chorus’s concert season, that is really just another piece of classical repertoire that commemorates no one in particular; a Type Two Requiem is programmed to celebrate the death [...]
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Last week I got an email from a student conductor who is performing a piece by John Adams, needing a synthesizer, specifically a Kurzweil K2500 or 2600. I knew that Robert Winter had a K2500 in his studio, otherwise I had no idea what to recommend. I asked him to tell me what patches the [...]
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Two nights ago, I had the privilege of hearing the “We’re not the UCLA Faculty String Quartet, String Quartet” perform with selected students at a private fundraiser for the new FRIENDS OF STRINGS at UCLA. Oh My God! They sounded amazing. What a joy to have such talent as colleagues and students. Their’s was the [...]
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OMG! Greg Brown (the fiddle player in this photo) just sent me this picture. It is the Yahara River Valley Boys, a bluegrass group I played with from 1972-4 in Madison Wisconsin. The photo looks vaguely like the Flying Burrito Brothers. Are these wholesome lads or what?
L-R: Roger Bourland, Ed Fyffe, Jamie Shelton, and Greg [...]
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OakWebWorks Tickets published a Top Ten Classical Music Blogs list recently, with an interesting selection. Yours truly came in at number three. The company that made this list sells tickets to all kinds of events around the US. Here is the criteria, as listed in my notification email:
How frequently the site is updated
Features
Quality of the [...]
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I have just read (finally!) Lynne Truss’s terrific Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. This book is a must-read to anyone who wants to understand punctuation.
In it, Ms Truss discusses an old punctuation source that tries to differentiate how commas, semicolons, colons and periods (full stops) are different. This particular [...]
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