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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Category Archives: classical
“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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NaBloPoMo Day 15! The conclusion to my little series on criticism continues to brew, so I thought in the meantime I’d post some Actual Music. …
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NaBloPoMo Day 13! I left off yesterday discussing my utopian vision for a better world. 😉 Or, at least my fervent hope that human interaction …
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NaBloPoMo Day 12! When I was a fresh-faced, eager young grad student in the first term of my Ph.D. composition program, I took a seminar …
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NaBloPoMo Day 11! Another quick post, while the follow-up to yesterday percolates… It’s hard to believe it, but it’s been nearly a year since McDoc …
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I didn’t expect that committing myself to a month of daily blogging would send me off on a nostalgia trip (for one thing, I’m uncomfortable with the notion that I’m old enough to be capable of nostalgia 😥 ). But the discussion of my Bartók String Quartet Watershed Moment brought up the memory of what has to be one of my top ten classical concert-going experiences of all time.
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NaBloPoMo Day 7! Yesterday I recounted the story of a defining moment in my musical education, when I learned that classical composition didn’t end with …
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NaBloPoMo Day 6! In yesterday’s post, I mentioned a few of the seminal composers and musical movements that developed during the 20th century, and that, …
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NaBloPoMo Day 5! (Happy Cinco de Mayo! 😀 ) It probably won’t come as a surprise that I have a musical cat. His name is …
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