Imagine, if you will, that you are a composer. Not a historical composer, mind you — we’re not talking powdered wigs and candelabras here — …
Category Archives: music criticism
Happy Autumn, Music Nerds! One of the things Miss Music Nerd did with her summer was spend a lot of time pondering the concept of …
Music Nerd Andy, who keep tabs on the classical scene in St. Louis and environs, passed along an offer from his home team, the St. …
…and living in Detroit! Which looks kinda like this right about now: Detroit Institute of Arts, December 2008 Anyhoo, Greetings and Happy 2009, Music Nerds …
McDoc did good. This morning he presented me with this book, which I hadn’t heard of, but which was actually written, it appears, especially for …
NaBloPoMo Day 22! You know, I have a confession to make: I thought it would be pretty easy to capture my experience of hearing Mahler’s …
“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…
NaBloPoMo Day 13! I left off yesterday discussing my utopian vision for a better world. 😉 Or, at least my fervent hope that human interaction …
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 …
As someone who has spent an embarrassingly long time as a graduate student, I’ve made a lot of jokes and, let’s be honest, talked a lot of trash about the whole enterprise. One of my standard lines is that if you stay in school long enough, you actually start to become dumber, rather than smarter. So imagine how gratified I was to find someone else express a similar thought! In Does Grad School Make You a Bad Reader?, musicologist Drew Massey explores how graduate education hampers one’s ability to read for pleasure, not to mention basic reading comprehension. That’s pretty ironic, since grad school is all about deepening one’s knowledge in the field one is passionate about, right?