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…
Your “listening guide” amazes me, in that it is a means of illustrating the role of various instrumental sections in communicating and “telling” a story. My background is science and technology so the 1 -1 ½ hours listening to a symphony with your presentation was an exciting learning experience I was not expecting.You are an exceptional talent and personality to be able to introduce someone like myself to the very complicated language of a symphony.