by Ryan Bañagale Billy Joel in 2009. Photo Credit: David Shankbone The first-ever academic conference dedicated to the music and lyrics of Billy Joel takes place this fall at Colorado College. But this is not simply a… Read More
By Katelijne Schiltz What has one eye but cannot see? Yes, I confess: this is a silly riddle, and its solution—a needle—is rather trivial. But we somehow feel attracted to it nevertheless, because it is a little game. When we don’t know the solution, what do we do? We start… Read More
by Robert W. Eshbach John Singer Sargent, portrait of Joachim.Art Gallery of Ontario Toronto Joseph Joachim is widely acknowledged to have been one of the most important musicians of the long 19th century. A Hungarian Jew, he rose… Read More
by Evan MacCarthy This past June, at the Vatican Library, while examining three fifteenth-century manuscripts containing copies of a musical treatise by the composer and music theorist Ugolino of Orvieto (ca. 1390-1452), I discovered an erased name on an otherwise blank page.[1]Just as I was about to… Read More
by Ralph Locke I have long been intrigued by the problem of how music relates to what is widely called “the exotic.” By “the exotic” I mean the various qualities that people in a given locale associate with some faraway place and the people who live there. Until very recently,… Read More
by Walter Rimler Harold Arlen was part of a community of songwriters who were friends and supporters of each other’s work. “We were always together in one bunch trying to help one another,” he told an interviewer. When George Gershwin completed “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” he… Read More
by Bryan Proksch The idea that the canon of musical works is a sort of museum—an idea advanced by Lydia Goehr, Peter Burkholder, and others—makes a lot of sense. Classical audiences are expected to be at least nominally conversant with certain composers and works from the past, and the same… Read More
We asked the critic Bernard Jacobson to reflect on his book Star Turns and Cameo Appearances, to be released in December. There probably are, I cheerfully confess, musicians and writers who might think that a critic who never took a music course in his life must… Read More