Christmas comes early to Music Nerd Land! 🙂 The GRAMMY® nominations are out, and boy, do I feel like a kid in a candy store! …
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Category Archives: 20th century
Here at McVirgo Manor, Saturday afternoon often means Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on CBC Radio 2. It’s one of the benefits of living so …
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21 at last! 😉 Oh, and look who decided to show up to the party! 🙂 I share my birthday with two other famous composers: …
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Yesterday on NPR’s Fresh Air, I heard an interview with singer and composer Theo Bleckmann, a German native who moved to New York in 1989 …
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Cross-posted at the Detroit Symphony Blog. Sometimes before I go to an orchestra concert, I think to myself, “I should listen to a recording of …
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Cross-posted at the Detroit Symphony Blog, because I am so famous and in demand! 😀 If you’re superstitious, you probably already have your lucky rabbit’s …
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One of my favorite stories from music history concerns the audience reaction at the première of Igor Stravinsky‘s ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite …
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NaBloPoMo Day 28! I was just reading the Composers Datebook (like a good little Music Nerd 😉 ) and I noticed that today is the …
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NaBloPoMo Day 18! This afternoon I attended the Detroit Symphony‘s performance of Gustav Mahler‘s Symphony no. 9. I’m going to write about it, you can …
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“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?”
I came across this quote the other day in a post about musical responses to great tragedies: “Requiems,” by Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker.
Ross’ understanding of Shakespeare’s question (which, as he mentions, Wallace Stevens cited while writing about World War II) concerns the light-in-the-darkness function that musicians serve in the face of horrific events:
How, in other words, can artists respond to news that exceeds their most extravagant nightmares?”
Happily, we can, and do, respond in many ways…
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