The transformation of the NFL — and by extension all professional leagues — from sports to entertainment can be seen most clearly in the evolution of the Super Bowl half-time show, now an object of…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Using music as medicine goes back to Antiquity and beyond. The Greeks were not alone in recognizing that music was powerful stuff, capable of not only calming the body, but also of rousing it. Administered…
Using music as medicine goes back to Antiquity and beyond. The Greeks were not alone in recognizing that music was powerful stuff, capable of not only calming the body, but also of rousing it. Administered…
Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, which will doubt-less figure prominently in the Academy Awards nominations to be issued next week, is a horror flick en pointe: terrifyingly claustrophobic, often painful, massively melodramatic, and ultimately self-destructive. In…
With their re-make of True Grit the Coens have shot and stuffed the original animal: so often, in the sights of big game hunters, the Western species refuses to go extinct.
Christmas is the most musical season. Melodies embedded in the memory are reanimated to light the fires of commerce, Christian devotion, and the family romance, packaging the Christmas Experience in song. It is impossible to…
For all its much-hyped and massively expensive high-tech stage machinery, the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold seems surprisingly underpowered, as if so much money and mental power went into the behemoth contraption…