I'm so sorry to report that our good friend Scott has passed away this week. Scott's family and friends have set up a GoFundMe page. Please consider contributing. More later. … [Read more...]
Ojai Music Festival and JACK Quartet
ONE of the best things about spring in Southern California is the Ojai Music Festival, which runs this Thursday to Sunday. I’m looking forward to this year’s festival, which was programmed by soprano Barbara Hannigan. Ojai is – in my two decades of attending most years – always good and sometimes great. It reminds us that classical music, for all the enduring work of the past, is a living art, … [Read more...]
What’s in a Name?
This is the second in a series of posts by guest blogger Milton Moore, a longtime music critic who has covered a wide array of genres. * * * When Scott invited me to write about the new music I was sharing with him, we immediately faced a dilemma: What to call this stuff? Some of this might slip into the classical bin, but it doesn’t really target the Mozart audience … [Read more...]
Time Pauses For Valentin Silvestrov
A quarter century ago, a New England journalist named Milton Moore turned me – a lover of rock and jazz without much interest in music before Elvis Presley and Charlie Parker – on to Schubert, late Beethoven, and The Well-Tempered Clavier. Milton, who has been reviewing music, classical and otherwise, since the ‘70s, today starts a more-or-less monthly column about contemporary and … [Read more...]
Guest Columnist: Mr. Rogers, and America
[contextly_auto_sidebar] I'M hardly the only Gen Xer to grow up on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, a show that first aired about a year before I was born. Part of me thinks that my fondness for the program comes from the fact that my frequent viewing companion -- my maternal grandmother -- was, like Rogers, a Pittsburgh Presbyterian. But Rogers and his show imprinted itself on all kinds of people, … [Read more...]
Guest Columnist: A Break in the Performance
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Regular CultureCrash guest columnist Lawrence Christon has a new piece about an incident in St. Louis that brings together a number of tendencies in the arts. Of course, the situation he writes about echoes both forward and backward in time; cultural appropriation has become one of the most contested issues lately and seems likely to remain that way. I don't concur 100 … [Read more...]
The Literary Courtney Barnett
[contextly_auto_sidebar] I CAN remember only a few times I've heard a song and immediately known I was hearing a major talent, someone I'd be paying attention to for years to come. The Smiths, Liz Phair, Pavement, Thelonious Monk, and Glenn Gould have all struck me that way. Time will tell if she really belongs in their company, but the Aussie singer-songwriter knocked me out with her song … [Read more...]
Southern Literature and the Drive-By Truckers
[contextly_auto_sidebar] CELEBRATED Yale historian C. Vann Woodward used to talk about the irony of Southern history, and the burden of Southern history, both phrases drawn in part from the novels of Faulkner. Patterson Hood, a son of Alabama who spent several decades in Athens, GA, before leaving the South like many a literary character before him, has made a fascinating songwriting career … [Read more...]
Rolling Stone, Music Journalism, and the Baby Boom
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LIKE a lot of people I know, I've just finished the biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. Sticky Fingers is more than just the story of one man, though it gets close to its subject: It's a real cultural history of English and American music, of American magazines, of pop culture in general, and a shadow biography of what I call Boomer Triumphalism. Wenner, … [Read more...]
Classical Music and The Echo Society
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SOMETIMES -- certainly not always -- it makes sense to take a chance and see something you have very little sense of. Because I had the night free and knew/ liked some of the people involved, I went Sunday night to the final concert of a weekend-long chamber-music festival (or something) in Los Angeles's Silverlake Hills. I figured there'd be a cocktail party for a few … [Read more...]