While the rich still have not figured out how to evade death, they have always been adept at escaping taxes even from beyond the grave. During Johann Sebastian Bach’s day, a sovereign’s demise was yet…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Nothing is more ephemeral than a concert. Once played it is gone. A recording cannot reproduce or even fully recall it. Such documents are at best approximations. Yet concerts both great and ghastly have a…
The photo — this one in the New York Times, above the fold — had an uncanny vintage look to it: there on the front page was a black-and-white photograph from 1960—the first black-and-white that…
Perhaps God is exacting his revenge on the Ratzingers and on Regensburg, whose cathedral boasted a famed musical establishment claimed by Franz Liszt to be the center of Catholic church music, even above Rome itself.…
Patches of snow cling to the muddy earth in the city’s picturesque 19th-century cemetery just to our north. Down in the gorge immediately to our south the creek builds momentum every hour as the thaw…
One of my college friends was a Deadhead. He had crates of cassette tapes with labels like “Bucknell, 1971”, Stanford 1973”; “Fillmore East 1970.” Of an evening he would navigate through these hundreds of cassettes…
Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” was released 50 years ago this coming Monday: August 17, 1959. That was ten years after, and ten degrees cooler, than the little big band of Miles’ “Birth of the…