Less than a month before the first presidential election of December 1788, Francis Hopkinson published his Seven Songs for the Harpsichord or Forte Piano, dedicating the set “To His Excellency George Washington, Esquire.” Hopkinson was a Philadelphia…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
For several years my grandparents lived in a small house on the same property on Bainbridge Island as my nuclear family—nuclear in more than one sense, since our home was a dozen miles from the…
Who says America doesn’t have a natural aristocracy? From young Bar(r)on von Trump to Lady Gaga, this country has produced legions of men, women, ADD teens, and hypoallergenic designer dogs, who radiantly fulfill Thomas Jefferson’s…
The funniest thing about presidential inaugural ceremonies is that anyone takes them seriously at all. This latest edition reached new heights—and depths—of comic excellence. To his credit, Barack Obama had a hard time keeping it…
Irony is the not-so-new normal. Somewhere back in the swirling dry-ice mists of history, round about the time of the one-and-only Clinton Administration, this venerable figure-of-speech stretched its wings and its brand and became a…
For many it remains an open question whether the tricentenary of one of J. S. Bach’s most famous tunes—or, to be more precise, the work that eventually spawned that tune—should be a moment of celebration…
London — ‘Tis the season to think about the next season. Before letting the wave of Christmas gifts crash of over their heads and/or into the digital stockings, and before undertaking their own yuletide retail…