From the category archives:
The Smiling Spider for soprano, soprano sax, viola, cello, and piano (1983) mp3
Words and music: Roger Bourland (quotes from Charlie Chaplin)
Performers: Composers in Red Sneakers, Karen McVoy, soprano
Publisher: Yelton Rhodes Music
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
The story behind this piece is actually pretty funny. The Composers in Red Sneakers decided to offer their “Concert [...]
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With the subtitle of “The Most Bizarre Musical Number Ever Filmed” it got my attention. It’s really worth watching cuz it’s so bizarre! It just keeps going, getting stranger and stranger! Try to stick it out till the end.
I’ll have whatever SHE’S having.
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This just in from the LA Times:
A Rhode Island school district has voted to fire all the teachers at an underperforming school.
Amazing!
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I have never had any interest in being a vegetarian, despite my complicated spiritual views. My days of eating huge steaks are over. I’ve become friends with eating chicken feet (dim sum) and tripe (ditto) occasionally, I love chicken and fish of all kinds. I don’t eat too much red meat, knowing it’s not that [...]
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At dinner the other night, two of our good friends whom we are visiting in London, Daniel and I asked “who is more British?” The two Brits listed their relatives–neither had a heritage that was mostly British. Daniel, who is Eurasian, listed Humphreys and Davies in his family tree–Welsh names. My father looked into our [...]
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I had avoided watching the recent “Who the [bleep] is Jackson Pollock?” thinking the story and punchline were all too predictable: woman finds painting in thrift shop, doesn’t realize it is a Pollock, she sells it and becomes rich. Well, this doesn’t exactly happen that way.
The protagonists in the film are two world-renown experts on [...]
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A man, who I’ll call Arthur, died in 2006 at age 60, leaving everything to his mother. He was a professor of zoology. In the case that he died before his mother, which he did, his mother was to give certain things to UCLA. Some were earmarked for the Music Department. His mother died recently [...]
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I thought it was peculiar that my fabulously new, hi tech Acura TL would have a cassette deck. I knew the end was coming for the audio cassette, but didn’t realize how soon that it would be.
Today, I got out my trusty old Sony Professional Walkman cassette recorder, and for the first time since 1972, [...]
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I’ve been to quite a few weddings over the past few years and have written about most of them. The one last week in Las Vegas took the cake. As I went through the event, it was a bit shocking, but in retrospect saw it as Performance Art, which may or may not have been [...]
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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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