How did I get into this? As a kid that was the inevitable question of concert day. I still ask it now and again. One of my colleagues, to be heard on violin with your Musical Patriot at the organ on All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London will often acknowledge his […]
I took the prescription sleeping pills before take-off but slept only in the thinnest intervals, perhaps one hour out of eight. This was to prove of some difficulty on my first day in Berlin, since my strategy for overnight flights is to knock myself out on the plane, then stay up as late as possible […]
At the beginning of August I drove from the Oregon Coast to the middle of New York State mostly on U. S. Highways and state and county roads. I spent the second night of the trip in Idaho Falls at a cheap motel with a view of the Mormon Temple just across the roaring Snake […]
Perusing my correspondence, I see that one year ago almost to the day is when I started into this whole thing. It happened that I was down in New York trying to gain an audience with my agent, but she, of course, was in full Major Major mode: even when she was in she was […]
Greta Thunberg’s four-minute jeremiad at the United Nations this past Monday was delivered not standing behind a pulpit or kneeling on rocky ground. With perfect posture she perched at the front of a bright white modernist chair that made her magenta raiment appear as angry as victim’s blood. The chair was an oddly clinical prop […]
The body politic has human parts: head, limbs, heart. That body has an abundance of these in the case of the royal giant that brandishes sword and scepter on the frontispiece of Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. This colossus has arms and torso made up of his anonymous subjects, their backs turned to the reader and their faces […]
Free tickets from a friend sent my companion and me to a production of the musical Big staged by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre on a sunny Sunday afternoon in July. My companion grew up in London and spent many an afternoon and evening in that greatest of theatre-city’s myriad venues seeing the greatest British actors […]
Other than the basic press blurbs, I could find no detailed reports of the music performed at the recent state banquet held in the Buckingham Palace ballroom. The largest space in the palace, the ballroom is presided over by a substantial and rather gaudily decorated organ originally built for another even more decadent royal folly, […]
The attacks of September 11, 2001 reinstated for more than a decade the Empire State Building as the highest structure in New York City, a distinction it had held from its completion in 1931 until 1972 when the north tower of the World Trade Center supplanted its midtown rival. Rising in defiance of the Great Depression, […]
By November of 1770 the English organist, traveler, and man of letters, Charles Burney had been on the road for five months, touring the Continent doing research for his General History of Music; the first of its four volumes would come out six years later. With winter looming and the Alps still to be crossed (or […]
As historic Midwestern floodwaters receded, another “bomb cyclone” attacked the central U.S. this week. It is a time of extremes: to the south wildfire danger builds in New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. So much for homeland security. Looking beyond the battered American interior and its borders, Cyclone Idai and its floods have brought far greater […]