No work of music has a greater lock on a single ritual than Edward Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance March no. 1 does on American graduations. Cock an ear in the direction of high school and…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
The last time the name Anna Magdalena appeared in fiction it was attached not to a human character but to an assassin’s rifle. The perpetrators of this crime were themselves a pair of highly paid…
Buster Keaton's 1923 silent film The Three Ages — a send-up of D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance, the grandaddy of all message films — ends on a visionary note. Like its satirical target, The Three Ages…
Johann Sebastian Bach’s last pupil, Johann Gottfried Müthel (1728–88) spent the final two decades of his life as a church organist in the Baltic city of Riga, far to the northeast of the three central…
It is not until the last of the eight episodes of Ripley, which dropped in April on Netflix, that Bach’s music makes an appearance. I’d been expecting it, and not just any piece from among…
The Eurovision Song Contest cannot be neutral. There is just one winner. That winner is chosen by combining the popular cellphone votes of millions of viewers with the tallies of the five-member juries in each…
In the summer of 1983 Ted Kaczynski was feeling hemmed in even in remote Lincoln, Montana. “There were too many people around my cabin,” he later wrote, “So I decided I needed some peace.” In…