Consider five variations on music’s ineffability: Disjunction. Music can be magnetic—attracting very specific meanings and affects in one moment in ways that seem so right on—and in another moment, seem to be quite indifferent to those meanings and affects. In a scene from Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (1999), a… Read More
In this conversation, the first of a multi-part interview series with performers, scholars, and pedagogues of early music, historically informed performance, and related topics, David Miller spoke with conductor, instrumentalist, and musicologist Joshua Rifkin. A transcript is provided for increased accessibility. As a conductor and performer on various keyboard… Read More
Ed. note: This essay is an offshoot from a lecture originally presented as the AMS Committee on Women and Gender Annual Endowed Lecture. Fred Maus and Tes Slominski read responses to that spoken delivery. These are also available to read (Maus; Slominski). I am grateful for the opportunity… Read More
On May 14, 2017, while waiting to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin was filmed playing two Soviet-era popular tunes on a grand piano: Solov’ev Sodoy’s “Evening Song,” a famous melody in St. Petersburg (the song’s lyrics refer to the city by its Soviet-era… Read More
by Margo Miller Colin Davis died 14 April 2013 in London at the age of 85. When Colin Davis first conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1967, he was something most players had not experienced. He was young,… Read More
To judge from video footage of Last Night of the Proms, 2013, the “dark Satanic Mills” that William Blake references in Jerusalem—Britain’s other national anthem (Hubert Parry, 1916)—were on the minds of exactly nobody. There on the podium stood the American conductor Marin Alsop,… Read More
by D. Kern Holoman from the AMS YouTube channel … Read More