Open Sesame
Do you remember the first time you encountered that phrase? Perhaps you saw it in an English translation of Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et une nuits (One Thousand and One…
Composers
The Annual Recital
A few weeks ago I attended the annual recital of my wife Marcia’s piano students, who range in age from six to eighteen. Annual student piano recitals have been a…
What’s More, It Wasn’t Serving As Entertainment!
“Walking home from the Civic Center Farmer’s Market a couple of Sundays ago, I heard a Mozart string quintet being blasted from what sounded like a boom box, a surrealistic…
One Blog Away
The faces of adult and youthful listeners! Children counting entrances of a musical idea on their fingers! Skeptics sometimes wonder: “Can young people in 2016, in the ‘Age of the…
Other Cheerleaders
Sometimes one can feel that one is a lone ‘voice crying in the wilderness’ – but that is seldom the case! Inevitably there are others who are also fixated on…
Today I watched an episode called “Discover Beethoven’s Fifth”, and it was marvelous! Maestro Maull and his talented orchestra gave me a one-hour thrill. I’ve always loved Beethoven, especially his Fifth Symphony. I studied piano for 7 years as a young person, and came to appreciate so many of the classical composers, but Beethoven’s Fifth has always thrilled me. I so appreciated the format of the program, and the Maestro involved all of us and taught us so much. Thank you for this fine program. And many thanks and praise to the orchestra! When the program ended, I clapped loudly and shouted “Bravo!! Bravo!!!”