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Category Archives: Music
Reflection on Tár
[Spoilers to follow, in case you’re worried!] We recently watched the film Tár starring Cate Blanchette. It’s a film with a lot, I mean a lot, of talking. We split our watching over two days. But the acting was so … Continue reading
“As One” – a chamber opera
Last night we had the wonderful experience of seeing “As One,” a chamber opera about a transgendered person’s voyage of self-discovery. As a chamber opera, the instrumental music was provided by a string quartet (our resident Fry Street Quartet), the … Continue reading
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On opera
I have long believed that I should love opera. I’m a great fan of “classical” music (a fairly meaningless term, as it encompasses way too much), and view its existence as one of the primary pieces of evidence for believing … Continue reading
Posted in Music, This & that in the life of CH
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The aural time traveler
Some years back my musicologist friend introduced me to the charming world of gramophones. (A brief history may be in order: before there were iPods and YouTube, there were CDs; before that, there were vinyl records, still very much in … Continue reading
Posted in 3QD essays, Historical episodes, Music, Phonograph records
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I wanna be a hipster. Who’s with me?
From Wikipedia: In his book Jazz, Frank Tirro defines the 1940s hipster: To the hipster, Bird was a living justification of their philosophy. The hipster is an underground man. He is to the Second World War what the dadaist was … Continue reading
A tale of two concerts
Maybe my favorite thing about living in Logan is our Chamber Music Series, and the fact that we have an in-house string quartet, the Fry Street Quartet. We heard them play last Tuesday, and on the program were Beethoven, Dohnanyi, … Continue reading
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Allen Toussaint
I happened across a recording of Allen Toussaint, a great New Orleans musician, and promptly bought his CD, The Bright Mississippi. Lots of old tunes, with bluesy piano that alternates between the old church style and something more appropriate to … Continue reading
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Music update
I’ve been to two chamber music concerts this year, both of them excellent. The first was last September, with the Shanghai Quartet. They played fascinating, difficult, and very compelling pieces by Penderecki and Yi-Wen Jiang. They have an incredibly balanced … Continue reading
Going to Jupiter
We attended a concert last night by the Jupiter String Quartet. Fabulous. Their first piece was Haydn’s last finished quartet, opus 77 # 2. Elegant. The last piece was a quartet Mendelssohn wrote when he was only 18. Lots of … Continue reading
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Charlie Bowers’ metal-eating bird
There’s weird, and there’s weirder. It’s weird to think of a metal-eating bird, who then lays an egg which hatches into an automobile. It’s weirder, I submit, to think of living in a rural western state, and going out at … Continue reading
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Pacifica Quartet
Last night we enjoyed a performance by the Pacifica Quartet. This group is fantastic. They have perfected a blending of their voices, so that no single voice overpowers the rest (unless or until the music requires it). And the program … Continue reading
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Beethoven & German idealism
I’m lucky to have been invited to present three lectures on “Beethoven & Philosophy” to the Beethoven class being held this semester (see below). They’re scheduled for the end of this month, so I’ve been preparing. Philosophers don’t have a … Continue reading
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