(note about video: My inclusion of this is a bit unfair to Lang Lang, as this is not a formal performance. Truth be told, it’s wonderful to see such joy and delight in the act of making music. Nevertheless…)
My good friend Melissa sent along an article that I missed yesterday from the [...]
Anything to get people to read, right?
In follow-up to the last post entitled Bach, Fugues and Britney Spears, I thought that I would share more of my love for the self-referential/reflexive art (would that be conceptual, perhaps? Nah… Bream has skill.) that has so influenced my own theater work, as can be evidenced [...]
“We’re just in a band. That dude swallows swords!”
listen to the audio clip
I’m a very far cry from what you’d call a country music aficionado I don’t think that Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies count but for various reasons I can sometimes be found associating with people affiliated with the industry, and as a [...]
“If anyone thought Manson was down for the count, think again.”
-Austin Scaggs
Rolling Stone
The most surprising aspect of Marilyn Manson’s latest album, Eat Me, Drink Me – his sixth studio release is that it’s decidedly human.
Gone are the fire and brimstone theatrics, heavy production and the Satan-spawn stereotype. Eat Me, Drink Me is an [...]
To see the iPod as an agent of isolation rather than a symptom of, or a clever adaptation to, that isolation is to confuse cause and effect.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar
from Earbuds and Mosh Pits
Back in 2004, I wrote a rather rambling, [...]
Students have left school, employees are taking vacation and the cities are filling up with tourists from all over. Now that the warmer months are here I’m republishing my earlier article on Thoth and NYC entertainment – a gentle reminder to get off your arse and see something interesting. Enjoy!
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photo © 2002, John [...]
In late 2003 and 2004, comedian Bill Bailey toured a show entitled Part Troll, which featured a good deal of his brilliant musical humour. Among the gems of musical mash-up, satire and spoof was one piece in particular an encore actually which deserves mention here (they all deserve mention, actually). [...]
Though the new Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero does not officially drop (in the U.S.) until April 17th, the extremely punk-style* marketing has been in full swing since at least February and its turning out to be an incredibly clever, engaging and effective marketing scheme at that!
Reznor himself reacts strongly against the claim [...]
Back in January, classical violinist and Avery Fisher Prize recipient Joshua Bell did something decidedly uncharacteristic of a Grammy Award winning musician he donned jeans, a t-shirt and a baseball cap and took to the streets to play for tip money.
With over a dozen recordings under his belt, countless appearances with the most prestigious [...]
In the grand tradition of Glenn Gould’s So You Want To Write A Fugue comes a wonderfully self-referential “instructional” video on fugue writing by NYU student and chess enthusiast Danny Pi.
Created for James Gardner’s Sight and Sound course (Pi is a Film and Television student at the Tisch School of the Arts), this little video [...]
Though entirely unintentional, the short list of articles found on this blog seem to feature a high incidence of “sex in classical music” entries. I have yet to create an entire entry dedicated solely to the subject, but embedded in other articles the reader will find references to the sexual appeal of such musicians [...]
It is now the end of April, 2005 and despite my best intentions I have not posted anything since December of ‘04. The reason, for those of you who don’t follow the news that I post over at www.roderickrussell.com, is because I was awarded a grant by the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts [...]
No, not a magical incantation to raise the dead (for that, see the link to Alcor), but rather a few words, reflections if you will, on playing classical guitar, written years ago.
Though short, they were recently uncovered and I thought that I might share them here.
The Nature of Classical Guitar: Reflections from a Personal Perspective
Music [...]
Several weeks ago the local alternative newspaper Seven Days ran two articles in the same issue that, despite their lack of explicit connection, nevertheless seemed to betray an intimate association.
The first article concerned an eccentric local composer named David Gunn. The second was a review of the book Sudden Noises from Inanimate Objects by [...]