The National Association of Piano Dealers reported 364,545 sales of new instruments in the United States in 1909. That was four times the number of automobiles manufactured in the country that same year. This output…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Try whistling a few bars of the Star-Spangled Banner in downtown Kabul if you want to find out how effective a national anthem is at making enemies. A less deadly outbreak of red-flag-waving hymnody made…
For, behold, the Lord will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. For by fire and by his sword will the Lord plead…
A song of protest has made it to the front page of The New York Times and to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. For the first time in history, the “artist” holding that…
Near the close of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, the first of the four operas that make up his epic Ring of the Nibelung cycle, Donner the God of Thunder delivers a depressing weather report—literally so,…
For music lovers possessed of even a dollop of reason September was a grim month as paeans to George Gershwin crescendoed toward mega-sforzando on the 24th, the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Aside from their…
What does Barbie sound like? The original doll’s blonde hair, pointed toes and pointed breasts define her look, but her voice was, until the sing-song-then-sadistic vocals of Jodi Benson in Toy Story 3 of 2010…