A Speakeasy of the Mind

Zombie Survival Guide

Eternal Youth

Respect
“Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” So says Noah Cross in “Chinatown.“ Institutions age and get respectable too. The New York Philharmonic is 167 years old and has earned a great deal of honest respect through all those years, and the tradition to which it’s dedicated has been accumulating respect for even longer. Respect can be fleeting, however, and needs more than just reputation to develop and endure. The tradition

Music For The Masses
How new is new, how old is old? When does the new become the old, and can something be permanently new, or permanently renewed? The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble is organized to play ‘new music,’ which generally means music from after Word War II, leavened with L’Histoire du Soldat here and Appalachian Spring there. A lot of the repertoire is accepted, familiar, even institutionalized – the GVSUNME fine recording of “

Slow And Unsteady
then . . . Break it down to its fundamental components, and music-making is a combination of two things, style and idea. The idea is the content, the style is the package. Bach, for example, wrote keyboard suites in both French and English styles which each have identifying characteristics. A contemporary example of this is the contents of

Arts Education
Let me be a little more didactic than usual: as individuals and as a society, we can do a hell of a lot to prepare ourselves to deal with the world, other people, ideas and problems if we bothered to put a little money into arts education, especially music.  Not every child taking music lessons is going to turn out to be a creative, or even professional, musician.  But every person who applies themselves to the study of music is going to learn a sense of discipline, abstract thought, structured problem-solving and the skill and patience to listen to others, and this happens for any kid who sits in a music class and sings songs with all their friends – they don’t

Dancing About Architecture
The Composer Portraits concerts for this season began Saturday night at Miller Theater, with percussionist Steven Schick performing as well as conducting the International Contemporary Ensemble in music of composer Iannis Xenakis. Performances of this music are rare enough, and therefore exceptional, and this concert was exceptionally well presented. Xenakis was a specialist’s specialist; in the rarified world of cutting-edge class