Dem Convention Music, Day 2: Tuesday Night Grab-Bag

The music for Tuesday night was kind of a grab-bag — a bit of a let down from Monday night’s funk-fest, if you ask me. There were many fills that I didn’t recognize, and most of the ones I did know didn’t really seem thematically related to the speaker they introduced (or to the one [...]

The Denver School of Funk!

You never know when an opportunity for music education will present itself. This is both delightful and vexing to yours truly, because it means that 1) there’s never a shortage of grist for the music-nerdy mill, but 2) there’s so much to know, I’m afraid that any day now, the hard drive in my brain [...]

Miss Music Nerd’s Zydeco Debut!

Hé, toi!
As I hinted at briefly in my last post, I got a chance to do some impromptu music-making while I was in Austin, Texas this past weekend at the Netroots Nation convention. I hadn’t expected to perform until Sunday morning, when I was to play for the Multifaith Worship Service. But when life provides [...]

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…

Happy May Day and NaBloPoMo!

Okay, so spring is technically over a month old, but the Upper-Mid-West, or Western-Northeast, or whatever you call the region where I currently reside, was slow to get the memo. We crawled gingerly out of our winter funk, only to get a coupla final cold blasts in our faces. But we persevere, and the daytime [...]

When Can We Write the Requiem for This War?

Miss Music Nerd is not an overtly political blog, and it is, for the most part, a lighthearted affair.
But there are times when I am moved to take a stand.

This video is from a performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. In the piece, Britten intersperses the Latin text of the traditional Requiem Mass with poems [...]