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…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
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…
In ancient Greece trumpet playing was an Olympic event. Herodorus of Megas had the winnings lips and lung power: beginning in 396 BCE, he won the trumpet laurels ten consecutive times. Those were fair weather…
Donald Trump leads by example. He does so with his thumbs. He leaves it to others to jump in the cockpit of the bombers or helm the submarines, shoulder the AR-15s or don the helmet…