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Posts published by “David Yearsley”

Ghosts At The Gate

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…

Bones Apart: The Napoleon Soundtrack Dissected

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…

A Thanksgiving Feast With Handel

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…

The Thrill Of The Now

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…

Mile High Musicology

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…

Election Time: A Vote for Bach

Ithaca, New York. Next week brings local elections to this college town in the Finger Lakes region of the Empire State. There will be a new mayor and a new town council. A couple of…

Bach & the Catskill Golden Spike

One thing the American public schools used to teach—or tried to—was the memorization of dates. At the top of that list were 1620, 1776, 1861, 1945. One of my favorite bathroom books remains the Timetables of…

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