I heard a story today about Rachmaninov meeting Tolstoy. The young composer, in his early 20s, and fresh off the success of his 2nd Piano Concerto, went to see the venerable old sage. Rachmaninov played a bit for Tolstoy, who listened for a while and then asked the young man, “Tell me, young man… does […]
Category Archives: Music
Rachmaninov Meets Tolstoy
13-Sep-20Temples The Shape of the Sky
08-Sep-17I don’t quite remember the year or the date, but at some point I saw on PBS Mikis Theodorakis’s oratorio To Axion Esti. The force of the performance, however, I do remember. It started with a bit of orchestral chaos, and then a chord, and something that sounded like the voice of a lonely, mournful […]
Tangled Up in Thucydides.
05-Nov-15The third piece I’ve written for Eidolon, this one about Bob Dylan’s apparent discovery of a new book by Pericles (or his general confusion about the Classics).
Bob Dylan, Conscience of a Generation.
05-Nov-15A few weeks ago I was cleaning up after a party at my house and came upon a paper bag full of books which a guest had apparently left as a gift. They were all recent books, the kind of stuff that makes me hate being in bookstores – I always feel like I have […]
Against The Queen of Pentacles.
17-Jan-15Suzanne Vega put an album out in 2014, “Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles,” which is at least one (and probably two) too many prepositional phrases, but the concept of the album is intriguing: Pentacles, she explains, in the Tarot deck are the suit of the material world; of comforts, the earth […]
La Boheme in Bloombergia.
26-Mar-14Pauperibus vates ego sum, quia pauper amavi; cum dare non possem munera, verba dabam. “I am the bard of the poor, because I have been a poor man in love; when I had no gifts to give, I gave words.” – Ovid As we get older, I think we all fear for the things we really […]
Talk About Damning With Faint Praise
13-Feb-14“The best written musical autobiography since Bob Dylan’s Chronicles.” – The Telegraph describing Morrissey’s Autobiography.
Music is politics.
04-Nov-12Today in Ohio there will be a concert at the Board of Elections during early voting. John Legend is headlining the concert. Do you think John Legend might be pulling a slightly different crowd to the polls than, say, Randy Owen?
Searching for Sugar Man.
24-Sep-12Recognition depends to a great extent on chance, but given enough time, chance produces fairly reliable results. In general, however, a single human lifetime is not long enough. And so there will always be people whose excellence goes unrecognized in their lifetimes. Van Gogh is the most extreme example, the painter who never sold a […]
The Journals of Jean Sibelius.
21-Oct-17Singida At a certain point in my college career I stopped worrying very much about my classes, and decided to get my education directly from the university library. One of the books I read at the time was Erik Tawaststjerna’s monumental three-volume biography of Sibelius. I often find that great musicians can also write, but Sibelius […]