Five Simple Ways to Lift Your Spirits

This weekend we returned to Standard Time—or, as I like to call it, Darkness Savings Time. This is usually a week where I can feel kind of meh, but I have made efforts to get on an earlier schedule, which helps, not to mention a daily dose of Vitamin D. I have some other simple [...]

Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra

Sometime in the early 1940′s, Bela Bartok emigrated to the United States.  He was broke, and, what is worse, sick.  Serge Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissioned him to write  a piece, which he composed while lying sick.  The result was his concerto for orchestra, a magnificent piece human ingenuity.  In it is [...]

The arts and the public sector

A while back, Aristotle introduced some discussion here about the relationship of the arts to the government–or you might say the relationship of the arts to the government’s money, which is another way of saying the relationship between the arts and the money that the government steals from your back pocket. I am a musician [...]

Inspiration and Perspiration

I’ve had occasion lately to think about the gift (and the problem) of inspiration.  As a musician, this is central to my life. One of my middle school art teachers once said that the artist needs to be inspired before he perspires, that one cannot set about an artistic task without a driving force behind [...]

For your edification: Bach’s un-Advent Cantata

Everyone thinks this is for Advent.  It’s actually for one of the last Sundays of the church year which precede Advent.  “Wachet auf” means, “wake up.”  It’s great music to jump start the morning.

Have you ever heard anything this beautiful before?

I have just recently picked up James R. Gaines’ Evening in the Palace of Reason, an account of the meeting in 1747 between Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived, and the Prussian emporer Frederick “the Great.”  It is a fascinating read, aside from the author’s occasional silly attempts to appeal to bourgeois [...]

Glenn Gould plays Brahms

One of my favorite musicians plays one of my favorite composers.  The Glenn Gould year is just winding down, and what better way to mark it than with the golden autumnal works of Johannes Brahms?

The recordings of Glenn Gould: my refuge, my strength, my fountain of inspiration

We’re coming upon the end of the Glenn Gould year, which marks the 75th anniversary of his birth and the 25th anniversary of his death.  This Canadian pianist was in a certain respect the H.L. Mencken of the music world, cavalierly displaying his healthy irreverence for the more fossilized aspects of the classical music scene.  [...]