Liberated Dissonance

Robert Schumann in 1839, the year before his marriage to Clara. Robert Schumann wrote his sprawling Fantasy for Piano Op. 17 in 1836 o...

I missed the Elysian Camerata's January 13 program at St. Asaph's, Bala Cynwyd. Somehow I got it into my head the concert was schedu...

My annual "Sleigh Ride" watch was jump-started unexpectedly yesterday, October 2, close to a month before it usually begins. ...

One of the joys of unemployment is all the extra reading time. Recently, I’ve gone through studies of two of my favorite postwar American ...

Every year, when the prospectus for the upcoming season of The Philadelphia Orchestra arrives in the mail, I leaf through it, looking for ...

Don't want to let too much time pass before I mention a pair of morale-boosting concerts I attended over the weekend. On Saturday, pian...

For the past few weeks I've been living with Kyle Gann's new book, Charles Ives's Concord: Essays After a Sonata, an exhaustive ...

I wrote this after reading Longfellow's "Wreck of  the Hesperus." It helps to have a dictionary handy. The Wreck of the ...

Several years ago, after reading John Ashbery's "Some Trees," I wrote the following poem, which is a direct imitation. The sub...

A compact, purposeful signature. John Ashbery signed this copy of Girls on the Run for me in Philadelphia in April 1999.   John Ashbery...