I’m on Substack now. Please go follow me there. Thank you. Photo by Rhamely on Unsplash In contrast to how I wrote here for years, with themed series and a weekend series focused on chamber music, etc. etc., I’m doing … Continue reading Series: Concert Programs
Cover photo by Dan Dimmock on Unsplash TL;DR- I’m going to start doing some exciting new things on Substack and I hope they justify a paid content model. Some ideas that come to mind worth addressing in this piece: A … Continue reading What Might Be New Around Here
Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash Everyone knows what a monopoly is. Everyone also knows that an alliteration can be very nice, and I love to use them. The opposite of a monopoly (where one seller controls the market) is … Continue reading The Monopsonistic Music Market?
Cover photo by Philippe Bout on Unsplash I’ve been hard at work on music lectures lately, with only a couple of weeks until I present Beethoven’s magnificent ninth symphony to an audience who just a few years ago had only … Continue reading The Potential for Scholarship
photo by Lauren Sauder on Unsplash If I’ve said it once here, I’ve said it a thousand times: I love a good list. And what’s better than a list? A list in two dimensions. As in, like, a list just … Continue reading Comparing Recordings: a Chart
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash A lot has changed since I last wrote regularly. A lot has changed in just the past 6 months. But I want to get writing here again. One of the biggest changes is that … Continue reading Listening Lists
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash Hey, remember this? (2023 Editor’s note: I wrote this nearly two years ago, and changed none of it, so here’s this as an attempt to tell myself I’ll start writing here again. Please leave … Continue reading A Return to Writing?
performed by no one, at least not anymore (cover image by Ira Selendripity) This piece almost doesn’t exist. In preparing this stretch of pieces for the Editor’s Choice series, I knew it would be difficult to find a recording of Simpson’s violin … Continue reading Simpson Violin Concerto
(cover image by Christin Hume) Apologies in no particular order to: Charles-Marie Widor Jacques Ibert Rameau Cécile Chaminade Tristan Murail André Jolivet Pierre Capdeveille Jean Rivier Francis Poulenc Andre Gedalge Paul Le Flem Yves Ramette Henri Sauguet …among many others, … Continue reading The French Symphony in Review
Maybe. The cover for this article (by Dan Gold) may seem not at all related to the subject at hand, but at the moment this article was posted (give or take) I am (or will have been? was just recently?) … Continue reading Spotify for Classical Music?
(cover image by Freddie Marriage) Unfortunately, no one can know all there is about everything. I’m at least a little ashamed to admit the degree of my unfamiliarity with, say, most of the symphonies and string quartets of Haydn, or Mozart (but … Continue reading Editor’s Choice: A New Series
See? It’s not all about Sibelius. (cover image by Luca Bravo) You can find the entire series (in reverse chronological order) here. I’m guessing that for any of you readers who wouldn’t consider yourselves to be diligent students of classical … Continue reading The Finnish Symphony in Review
(cover image by Aldric Rivat) Move over, Hovhaness (67ish), Haydn (100+), Bourgeois (114), Dittersdorf (120ish), and even Rowan Taylor (265). You thought Shostakovich’s 15 symphonies, Niels Viggo Bentzon’s 24, Myaskovsky’s 27, Mozart’s 40+, or others held some record for most … Continue reading Quirky Quantity or Questionable Quality?
(cover image by Ian Dooley) The series is available, in reverse chronological order, here. This has been one of the most exciting series we’ve done. There has been such a wide spectrum of styles and approaches, but really just excellent … Continue reading The American Symphony in Review
(or inspiration) The Preciousness of the Live Music Experience A soapbox moment (cover image by Adrian Korte) If my memory serves me correctly, my first post on this blog, back when I thought I’d listen to and leave notes about … Continue reading The Importance of Excellence
or The American Symphony: a Series I’ve been wanting to use that line for so long, and I am positive someone’s used it somewhere but I haven’t even bothered looking because I’m so proud I thought of it. In any case, … Continue reading America’s Next Top Mahler
(cover image by Ian Baldwin) I started this (last) month’s series by talking about how difficult it was for me to appreciate and discover opera the way I listen to music (headphones, no visuals, no subtitles, etc.), but I discovered … Continue reading A Month of Opera in Review
1,000,000 is a lot of almost anything. 1 million seconds is about 11 and a half days. 1 million days is more than 2,737 years. You could log 1 million miles (ish) by circling the earth about 40 times, or … Continue reading A Million Musical Words
Phew. The series can be reviewed here. That was a ton of music. And really it’s a testament to how much excellent music there is from that small little corner of the world up there off the coast of mainland … Continue reading The English Symphony in Review
This is finally happening. There was a discussion I read online recently about countries or cultures ‘pulling their weight’ or not in classical music relative to the country’s international/historical influence and how the renown of their classical musicians is in … Continue reading Series: The English Symphony
In the past, we’ve done series about different instruments (and another one is queued up), and I’ve spoken before about the difficulty of warming up to and appreciating opera the way I am currently used to listening to music, but … Continue reading The Human Voice
Fugue for Thought 