I didn’t vault happily into the New Year, but slunk into it by way of the cinema, on January 1st taking in a double bill whose two soundtracks offered huge contrasts with another — a…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
One of the longest milliseconds I ever lived through came before the beginning of the Dies irae from Mozart’s Requiem. The members of the Stanford Chorus crowded onto the risers at the back of the…
Edward Winslow’s Good Newes from New-England published in 1624 in London begins its account in November of 1621. There is no word of the first Thanksgiving. That didn’t happen until 1623 and was a day…
One of the most widespread platitudes about music is that it is a universal language: thus the golden LP of the Voyager spacecraft launched in the 1970s and since last year gliding effortlessly beyond the…
Last week’s 6.0 earthquake epicentered in California’s Napa Valley was taken by a few evangelical types as a warning sign from God against the endemic decadence of wine country, not only a condemnation of the…
An early August road trip heading east from the city of Ithaca in the middle of New York State to southern Vermont promises calm, pastoral progress. With farming in steep decline the forest is reclaiming…
You might think that nothing is more British than young Prince George, the toddler who recently turned one and whose birth has plagued tabloids and televisions with such smiley aplomb ever since. It’s not his…