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In my most recent NPR “More than Music” show – “’Blowin’ in the Wind’ – Music and American Identity” -- the conductor JoAnn Falletta asks, “‘How can we grow as human beings without the arts?” She continues:  “If you don’t learn through the arts as a child, you can’t open yourself up easily. I read once when I was very young that the arts help us deal with our mortality. … [Read more...] about The Answer Is “Blowin’ in the Wind”

In celebration (yet again) of the Ives Sesquicentenary, I write for the online digital magazine Persuasion: “Of the crises today afflicting the fractured American experience, the least acknowledged and understood is an erosion of the American arts correlating with eroding cultural memory. Never before have Americans elected a president as divorced from historical … [Read more...] about Ives and the Erosion of the American Arts

Excerpts from my most recent “More than Music” show on NPR: “Finding the Common Good – Charles Ives at 150”: Ives is a self-made Connecticut Yankee, born in 1874, who’s all about seeking common purpose, common sentiment, common good.  So at a moment when our nation seems to be coming apart, Ives speaks to us about the things that hold us together – … [Read more...] about Abraham Lincoln, Ragtime, and Charles Ives on NPR

Teddy died last Sunday after a short, swift illness, probably cancer. He was eleven years old. My seminal Teddy memory: in the kitchen, during his early adulthood, I off-handedly said: “Mommy’s coming.” Teddy quivered with an anticipatory elation that consumed every particle of his being. This was my first experience of his bewildering linguistic acumen, and of an … [Read more...] about Remembering Teddy

Today’s online edition of “The American Scholar” carries my essay on Lawrence Tibbett and how he "prophesied today's Metropolitan Opera crisis." You can read it here. An extract follows: In a recent New York Times “guest essay,” Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s embattled general manager, expresses the naïve hope that “new operas by living composers” can make … [Read more...] about Lawrence Tibbett and the Fate of American Opera Today