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Alex Ross noted a couple months ago that the Metropolitan Opera’s new $16m Ring cycle was beginning . Is this a good use of resources in tough times? he asks. He makes a good try at arguing that Wagner, at least, is opera for everyone (Wagner’s views on the relationship of art to society were [...]
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
November 29th, 2010
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Arts reviews, Music, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Framing, Sports, Technology and Society, Uncategorized
November 7th, 2010
They were careless people, Mick and Keef. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess….
August 31st, 2008
Category: Music
Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee weren’t actually interchangeable; “Tweedle-dum” was Handel, while Tweedle-dee was a now-obscure contemporary named Bononcini.
May 8th, 2008
Category: History, Literature, Music, Religion, Religion and Politics, Struggle Between Good and Evil
The Battle Hymn of the Republic as an exemplar of jihadist feeling.
March 16th, 2008
Virginia Woolf does not heart Hillary.
August 2nd, 2007
Category: Music
Snapping on the car radio, I caught a voice singing the last syllable of a song, and immediately recognized it as Tommy Makem singing the end of “Four Green Fields.” Music is potent stuff.
April 17th, 2007
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Music
Mike O’Hare is distinctly unimpressed by rap. I’m not as hostile as he is–I can think of at least a handful of remarkably complex rap albums (in particular stuff from the late 1980s like Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest and Eric B. and Rakim) albums that I continue to listen to today. That said, [...]
April 17th, 2007
Predictably, Imus’ little contretemps raises questions about the relentless truly repulsive conventions of gangsta rap and its related forms. This AP story has some interesting quotes, from critics hostile to the misogynistic, violent stream of gangsta rap and from its defenders anxious to distinguish it from Imus’ japes and jabs. The standard defense of this [...]
