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Posts published by “David Yearsley”

The Song Remains The Same: Detuning The Democratic Defeat

Released only the day before the election, will.i.am’s sonic squib, “Yes She Can,” was the final political misfire of the musical campaign, the cannon’s weak report barely heard as evening fell on Kamala Harris’s presidential…

No She Couldn’t

It is hard now to think back beyond Tuesday night. But I do remember that when I heard “Yes She Can” on Monday afternoon, released that day by the ardent Democrat, will.i.am, I felt that…

Swing State Blues

Twice a year, every spring and fall, Ithaca, New York hosts one of the biggest used book sales in the United States. Staffed by a legion of volunteers who work for months accepting and organizing…

Ives At Election Time

The iconoclastic American composer become cultural monument Charles Ives was born 150 years ago last Sunday. Ulysses S. Grant was then in the midst of his second term as president. Ives’s father George, the formative…

Sun King Playlists

“To faint was a fault past hope of pardon,” wrote the Duke of Saint-Simon in his Memoirs of Louis XIV, an insider’s account of battlefield debacles, antechamber intrigues and bedroom assignations during the reign of…

In Praise Of The First Piano Duets

The season has changed, if reluctantly. Time to put the storm windows on the old clapbord house, tune the grand piano and take out a volume of 18th-century duets off the nearby music shelf. And…

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