Any musician on the road, especially one who plays the organ, frequently confronts the contrast between suburban periphery and urban center—or what’s left of it. Typically the best instruments are in venerable churches in the…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
A handful of tax resisters lingered outside of the post office in downtown Ithaca on Monday into the early evening when I walked by, my return already filed electronically earlier that day. The protesters formed…
The intemperate genius John Bull was born in either 1562 or 1563. Let’s choose the later of these two possibilities and duly celebrate 2013 as Bull’s 450th. In contrast to the archetypal Englishman John Bull,…
Now that the salt has finally settled to the bottom of the 2012 movie season popcorn tub, it’s time to pick through the recalcitrant kernels and send them back to the molars for last rites.…
It was fitting that Rafael Puyana, the Colombian harpsichordist who died on March 1st in Paris at the age of 81, should have made his debut — on piano — in 1945 at the Teatro…
According to long-accepted, though unverifiable anecdote, the idea for the first charitable fund for musicians was born when three London players had just exited a popular coffee house in the Haymarket in 1738 and saw…
Seth MacFarlane claimed in his opening monologue that this year’s Oscars adopted for the first time ever a theme — “the wedding of film and music” as he put it. The spectacle that followed the…
The Military-Football Complex becomes more sinister every year. One should never be fooled into thinking the apogee of cynicism has been reached when the first Sunday in February rolls around and the beast’s infernal machinations…
Panic set in not for the obvious reasons: the blinding white stone of the Capitol dome, ramparts and columns resembling nothing so much as Albert Speer’s Hall of the People after a full-on peroxide scrub…