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Posts published by “David Yearsley”

Rammellzzee, Come Home!

We saw her hanging from lamp posts all over Paris—one of those women from a 19th-century Japanese woodcut, her hair pinned up in a two-tiered bun, her kimono adorned with prints of branches bearing buds…

In The Silent Musical Bunker

In front of the Horniman Museum in the leafy Forest Hill district of London stands a weathered Tlingit totem pole. It is loomed over by the museum’s squat-yet-somehow-also-lofty clocktower and regarded from behind with neo-medieval…

The Many Masks Of The Sexless Spy

In America, everything is possible, even Mission Impossible. Especially Mission Impossible. The theme music proclaims it. Bursting out of a high tremolo like a fuse burning fast, the opening trombone-heavy groove is jaunty yet resolute.…

Manning Up In The Burbs

The suburbs are a war zone. That was how the General saw things. He was my aunt’s father-in-law. I met him only a handful of times over the years, mostly at family celebrations, like my…

Bred To Kill

(Amidst all the pugilistic politics marking Mexican-American relations of late, the Musical Patriot limbers up a column that trotted into the ring of public opinion ten years ago, in May of 2015.) Although the singing…

High-Altitude Sonic Tonic

In these days when the formerly public sphere is balkanized by billions of individualized audiotopias in which so many are plugged into their own algorithmized soundtracks, the actual choosing of music for a road trip…

Over There: Isolating War Music

When war broke out in Europe in early August of 1914, that month’s edition of The Etude, America’s “Journal of the Musician, the Music Student and all Music Lovers,” had already appeared. The editor, James…

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