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Posts published by “David Yearsley”

Baby Bach Will Be Heard

Even frivolous fictional characters have found a convenient whipping boy in the youngest son of J. S. Bach. The late, lamented Dr. Peter Schickele’s send-up biography of P.D.Q. Bach quips that the talentless rogue had…

LVIII Forever

At last, the Super Bowl made it to Paradise.  There, a glittering being appeared, ethereal, ever-loving. She could sing like an Angel because she was one. But she didn’t, not at this halftime. Like the…

Fugitive Music: The Zone of Interest & the Chorus of Souls

Few if any moviegoers will stray into The Zone of Interest thinking it’s a biopic about Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and his tight-fisted monetary policy. They know beforehand that they’ve come to see a Holocaust…

The House of Usher

The night that word came through that Usher would be headlining the Super Bowl halftime show this year, you had a dream that you were trapped in a deserted warehouse pursued by a pink tank.…

Concourse Contours: Satchmo & the Max Roach Centenary

Louis Armstrong’s trumpet sighs and pleads in counterpoint with the airport announcements. The melody is barely audible but still unmistakable above the thunderous whisper of a thousand four-wheeled suitcases rolling across granite floors, the centripetal…

The Great Wave

Bainbridge Island, Washington. It was 1973. I was eight years old and Hollywood was into disaster movies. Somehow, I fibbed my way with a friend and his teenage, baby-sitting sister into a matinee screening of…

Maestro Mania

The essential trait shared by creators of movies and symphonies is vanity. Neither form of expression would exist without the unshakeable belief of the director or composer that the entire concert hall or cinema audience,…

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