I’m not kidding, music nerds — you need to drop whatever you’re doing and spend the next 20 minutes watching this. You’ll thank me after, …
Category Archives: music education
So there I was, minding my own business on my flight to L.A. for the GRAMMYS. I had just cued up my iPod to a …
McDoc wants to take piano lessons. He asked me the other night what I thought the general prognosis was for adult piano students – how …
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 …
“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?
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 …
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, …