Forget the Christmas tree and Saint Nic’s suit, it is music that marks Germany’s greatest contributions to the holiday. Aside from any number of carols, there is the ubiquitous Messiah, like Handel himself, to be…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
The goal of baroque composers was to trigger the emotions. Yet many moderns enjoy this music because they hear it is unthreatening. To them, the sounds of cantatas, concertos, and suites are merely pleasing. There…
Like no other people before us, we live with the songs of the dead. In the car or at home, walking or e-biking, in the airplane or hospital waiting room, lying in bed or on…
As I left the movie theatre in downtown Ithaca, New York on the Friday night after Thanksgiving a wintery gust ripped a crucial piece of paper from my ungloved hand. On that scrap I’d sketched…
For those with means, there is always too much food at Thanksgiving. Overproduction and overconsumption go hand in hand, or perhaps from hand into mouth. As Sir Thomas Malory, didn’t put it, Enough is as…
It was fitting that Rafael Puyana, the Colombian harpsichordist who died ten years ago in Paris at the age of eighty-one, should have made his debut—on piano—in 1945 at the Teatro de Cristóbal Colón (Christopher…
Go West, middle-aged man! Horace Greeley took one of the first stagecoaches into Denver in the 1850s when the place was just a mining camp born of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush. From New York…