While the greatest musical dynasties ruled over vast empires of the imagination, their geographic domains were small. The Couperins held the organist post at the church of St. Gervais in Paris for nearly two hundred…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
The American electoral system is a difficult thing to explain to Europeans with a long tradition of proportional representation. My first two-year stretch spent living in Berlin between 2003 and 2005 coincided with the endless…
The Romney “Believe in America” bus may have been on the road right until the end, but in the last weeks of the campaign it was clear from the laughable musical forces gathered under the…
Born October 19th, 1862 Auguste Lumière—the elder of the two brothers, who later became the world’s first filmmakers—would have celebrated his 150th birthday last week. If one defines the cinema as the projecting of a…
The importance of music can only be truly gauged by its absence. A bride walking down the aisle in silence is an act that thunders more loudly than a hundred trumpets and timpani. Likewise, watching…
Spotting an acquaintance in an airport can be unsettling. Should you say hello or disappear wordlessly down the concourse? It’s especially awkward when you spot that friend lurking among the smut section in a bookstore/giftshop…
Berlin — Just as wallpaper sometimes tells you almost everything you need to know about the people who live in the house it decorates, so too can even the most banal soundtrack to a political…