I want it...I want it...I WANT IT!!!!"

In this clip Leonard Bernstein is touching on that mysterious essence of the musical experience that has had psychologists and theorists (not to mention writers of sonnets and novels) spinning their wheels since time immemorial. That is, simply put, how and why does music convey emotion?

City of Ghosts

My cell phone rings.

“Where are you?”

“I’m on Boulevard Étrangers Morts pour la France. I’ll meet you at Balzac, and then we should go to Marcel Proust. Can’t not pay my respects.”

Frozen Music

It’s impossible not to feel spiritually lifted by being at Chartres. Perhaps this is because, as Henry Adams points out, the imagery in the thousands of statues and bas-reliefs is free of fear and loathing.

Boulevard Night in Paris

What did the Parisian audience, used to European modernism when they hear music by a living composer, think of “City Noir” with its strange LA vibes and movement titles like “The Song is for You” and “Boulevard Night”? Hard to know.

Glamourpuss

Stokowski seems to have had no filter, no point at which he could look at himself in the mirror and say “No Leopold, THAT you will NOT do!” But, all the tackiness aside, there is something refreshing about these adventures. Ultimately Stokowski’s was an intensely creative mind.

Sledgehammer

Perhaps the most tragic thing about warfare at such close quarters is that the soldiers, no matter how rational they may try to be, inevitably are overcome with seething hatred for their enemies. Warfare quickly becomes personal and very very ugly.

The Enigma Code

Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony seems, at least form a formal point of view, like a work whose materials are packed into a the template of a four-movement design but that are in fact struggling to find a more radical means of organization, the solution to which wasn’t found until the Seventh.

Hum me a few bars

Stravinsky’s phrases and harmonic cadences at first signal to us that we’re comfortably located in the rational universe of Bach or Pergolesi. But then he trips us up by adding an extra fraction of a beat or by arbitrarily extending a phrase beyond its expected length. They are like Harpo Marx misbehaving at a dinner party.

A Noble and Sentimental Guy

The audience was scandalized by the Ravel waltzes— they were greeted with “howls of protest and derision.” (What premiere in 1911 was NOT greeted with howls of protest and derision?)

Marcel Proost: back from the dead

Let’s call it ‘Tahiti of the Mind.’ I’ve been home since December. But I started a new piece, and that just sorta sucked the air out of Hellmouth.”

The Turn of Several Screws

“Got a problem, Marcel?” I say, although truth to tell, I wouldn’t know what to do to fix a forty year-old chopper.

“Naw, just tightening the cap on the carb. Only takes a couple turns of the screw here. Just call me Peter Quint.”

Listening to Walt Whitman

Seeing the big, slow-moving bearded figure of Whitman walking quietly down the long rows of cots to say hello, perhaps have a chat or change a bandage, must have been like an apparition of heaven-sent kindness.