I’ve been teaching a music journalism class here at Cornell this semester. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings over the past eleven weeks I’ve joined eight students for an hour-and-a-quarter in a windowless rehearsal room in…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Bach would have been an excellent poll worker, even if in his professional life as a musical functionary he bristled under proto-democratic institutions and civic authority, preferring instead to work for enlightened despots. The musicologist…
Pandemic Halloween has been gifted a soundtrack: Republican rocker Ted Nugent’s ghoulish and deafening version of the Star-Spangled Banner. There is nothing—not Carl Maria von Weber’s Wolf Glen, not Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata in D…
Thursday night’s presidential debate was branded by many a pundit a historic first. The rogue Interrupter-in-Chief would be held in check by the latest technological breakthrough from the Pentagon, one developed after years of research…
The Democratic Process is in its final season. Thursday night’s line-up attempted a novel format in which the presidential candidates duked it out separately in parallel prime-time slots. In the end it all comes down…
Fall color is showing itself on the steep hills rising up from Lake Cayuga, which stretches north from the city of Ithaca in the middle of New York State. The Ice Age glaciers carved the…
There’s nothing more effective at igniting interest than controversy. Such are the paradoxes and manipulations of the present age that cancel culture provides free advertising. Censorship always piques curiosity. And so it is with the…
Don’t run, walk, or crawl towards the Apocalypse. Dance. This most curious form of human movement, unlimited in its variety and meanings, and instantly recognizable even by other species (our dog would go berserk when…
J. S. Bach’s music has many lessons to teach us, though they are rarely for the faint-of-heart. Indeed, faintness of heart is one of Bach’s main themes. In this gnarled body of work, weakness and…