It can be an instructive and amusing exercise to pretend you’re the one who has to write the movie captions for the hearing impaired. Sound effects are easy: [distant artillery fire]; [a chainsaw in the closet];…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
No work of music has a greater lock on a single ritual than Edward Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance March no. 1 does on American graduations. Cock an ear in the direction of high school and…
All traces of snow are at last gone from the picturesque nineteenth-century cemetery in Ithaca, New York. Down below in the nearby the Cascadilla Gorge the creek gathers momentum from late-arriving spring’s rain. Just beyond…
Mozart’s music is for everybody, from diaper-clad babies to mass-murdering dictators. That chilling truth launches the brutal slapstick satire—or do I mean hyper-realist romp?—of Armando Iannuci’s delightful and disturbing film, Death of Stalin. What we…
I was born on tax day. But it was only on my 40th birthday (13 years ago) that my quick-witted friend David Borden—pioneering electronic music master, first tester of the Moog synthesizers and founder of…
The most famous string quartets of the present age take their names from diverse sources: the Emerson from an American transcendentalist whose first name is Ralph; the Juilliard from the famous conservatory where it is…
Jerry Springer: The Opera closed a week ago on Broadway after a three-month run. Given the show’s crazed, megalomaniacal, helmet-haired title character, and its diverse tableaux that ranges from Jesus-on-the-cross to tap-dancing Klansmen and other…
In the final pages of Charles Burney’s massive four-volume General History of Music published between 1776 and 1789 and the first of its kind written in English, there appears an elegy for an instrument that…
Music may be the food love, as Shakespeare put it at the opening of Twelfth Night, but he could also have observed that music feeds on money. A few are made rich by their devotion to…