music

the archivist January 24, 2024

South Dakota’s may plausibly be considered the most genuinely innovative, most inspirationally forward-looking professional orchestra in the United States. It is also the happiest professional orchestra I know, and the most engaged. Fulfilling Theodore Thomas’s credo, it “shows the culture of the community.” Link: The American Scholar | Shostakovich in South Dakota A manifesto for […]

the archivist September 8, 2023

About 18 months ago (in the summer of 1996) I went to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (for example, standing at a bus stop in the rain); and under normal circumstances I would have walked out […]

the archivist May 24, 2021

Music A Subversive History by Ted Gioia Perseus Books, Basic Books 528 pages, published 2019. From the publisher: “A dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched” (Los Angeles Times) global history of music that reveals how songs have shifted societies and sparked revolutions. Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions […]

the archivist August 9, 2020

Allegro Tomas Tranströmer Translated by Robin Fulton I play Haydn after a black day and feel a simple warmth in my hands. The keys are willing. Soft hammers strike. The resonance green, lively and calm. The music says freedom exists and someone doesn’t pay the emperor tax. I push down my hands in my Haydnpockets […]

the archivist July 17, 2013

I wasn’t always a fan of Bruce Springsteen. Of course, I knew his music (or so I thought). Who didn’t? Every song on Born in the USA had been a single, and had been played to death, right? And then he did those mediocre movie soundtrack songs in the 90s, which, I was convinced, were actually the […]

the archivist February 16, 2013

“And, of course, that is what all of this is – all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or […]

the archivist July 4, 2012

Via the fabulous Oona, my sewing inspiration, I am obsessed with this song: I love his voice and modulation. The instrumentation. And it’s Baltimore! Just perfect. I think I have to buy this. [caesura] And because I can’t hear anyone mention today’s date without thinking of this song, here is my dear Aimee in an […]

the archivist June 16, 2012

  Remember WinMX? In that period when I switched from an anti-internet holdout to a wannabe webmonkey, WinMX was THE P2P to install. I missed the original Napster by a few months, and then later LimeWire and Kazaa made piracy all spammy and spendy, but for a few brief years, WinMX was a fabulous, clean […]

the archivist July 7, 2011

J & I have been watching a TV show from the 90s on Netflix. Well, actually, several of them. The one we stream is a show that he learned to love in reruns, not so very long ago; I, on the other hand, occasionally caught a bit of it in its original run (if we […]

the archivist February 18, 2011

A quote of the day on my email header today: “Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.”–Edgar Cayce. I have to disagree. I think dreams are tonight’s questions to yesterday’s (or last year’s, or 10 years ago’s) answers. And we must always question the answers, my darlings. Even if we are not mighty mighty or […]