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…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
It is eerily fitting that last Saturday’s centennial of modern jazz genius Charlie Parker’s birth should have fallen in the midst of a global pandemic. To be recognized as an elite jazz musician in Parker’s…
Across four nights, the televised program of the Republican National Convention had all the drama of an interminable student piano recital in which one put-upon pupil after another trudges dutifully to the bench of doom,…
Politically packaged, extended-play infomercials (i.e., conventions) make abundant use of music. Partly this has to do with the necessity of cleansing the palate and the ear of the monotone of presidential promotion and the same-old…
Raving about Joe: What if grandad showed up at a rave? You’d probably be smart to dip out of the nearest exit and find your kicks somewhere else that night. Or maybe you could just…
Last Friday night while protesters were being shoved into unmarked vans in Portland by federal paramilitaries, PBS broadcast George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in its Great Performances series. The opera was a strange choice for these times.…
While a White Man President raved in front of dead White Man Presidents in South Dakota, a couple of those same stone faces were re-animated as black men rapping about the Founding of the United…