Hard Thoughts: A Renaissance Woman’s Dilemma (part 1)

NaBloPoMo Day 18!
This afternoon I attended the Detroit Symphony’s performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 9. I’m going to write about it, you can bet your bottom dollar, but I haven’t quite peeled myself off the ceiling yet (I hope it’s obvious that I mean that in a good way! ), so I’ll sleep [...]

Criticism: Possible Antidotes… and That’s Enough for Now!

“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?”

I came across this quote the other day in a post about musical responses to great tragedies: “Requiems,” by Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker.

Ross’ understanding of Shakespeare’s question (which, as he mentions, Wallace Stevens cited while writing about World War II) concerns the light-in-the-darkness function that musicians serve in the face of horrific events:

How, in other words, can artists respond to news that exceeds their most extravagant nightmares?”

Happily, we can, and do, respond in many ways…

Criticism: It Sucks! (part the third)

NaBloPoMo Day 13!
I left off yesterday discussing my utopian vision for a better world. Or, at least my fervent hope that human interaction isn’t by definition doomed to devolve into nitpicking one-upmanship, and that we just might be capable of more. I have just a few more thoughts on the topic for now.
If we [...]

Criticism: It Sucks! (part 2)

NaBloPoMo Day 12!
Meeemmmm’ries!

When I was a fresh-faced, eager young grad student in the first term of my Ph.D. composition program, I took a seminar in the Critical Studies division of my university’s music department. (That’s an updated term for an updated type of musicology, btw.) Even though I wasn’t a musicologist myself, I [...]

Criticism: It Sucks! (part 1)

As someone who has spent an embarrassingly long time as a graduate student, I’ve made a lot of jokes and, let’s be honest, talked a lot of trash about the whole enterprise. One of my standard lines is that if you stay in school long enough, you actually start to become dumber, rather than smarter. So imagine how gratified I was to find someone else express a similar thought! In Does Grad School Make You a Bad Reader?, musicologist Drew Massey explores how graduate education hampers one’s ability to read for pleasure, not to mention basic reading comprehension. That’s pretty ironic, since grad school is all about deepening one’s knowledge in the field one is passionate about, right?

My Musical Conversion, Part 2

NaBloPoMo Day 7!
Yesterday I recounted the story of a defining moment in my musical education, when I learned that classical composition didn’t end with the dawn of the 20th century. (I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I’d learned this earlier — then again, I was enough of a geek in high school [...]

My Musical Conversion, Part 1

NaBloPoMo Day 6!
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned a few of the seminal composers and musical movements that developed during the 20th century, and that, depending on your point of view, either a) advanced the field of music in exciting ways, casting off the shackles of outmoded 19th-century Romanticism and opening up whole new worlds of [...]

Et tu, CBC?

One of the nice things about living in Detroit (yes, there are some!) is that we’re close enough to Canada to pick up the CBC radio stations. I cannot stand commercial radio — the ads are so obnoxious, I can rarely wait to see if there’ll even be any music scattered among them, let alone [...]

The Fifth Beatle, or Music Education Begins at Home!

As you might expect, I’m an enthusiastic proponent of music education in all stages of life, starting in early childhood and continuing as long as a person has life left in ‘em. An early start confers many advantages: in addition to the sheer joy and fun that it can bring, involvement in music is believed [...]