Liberated Dissonance

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...

Before another week goes by, I want to mention two concerts I attended on back-to-back Sundays. On April 30, in a program at St. Asaph’s Ch...

My librarian tells me there has been a run on dystopian novels of late. The most popular is, of course,  1984, with Margaret Attwood's H...

The crew of the fine Art Music Company  performs  Brahms'  Piano Quartet  No. 1  in G Minor  Op. 25 Sunday  at the Ethical Soci...

Steve Kramer performs J.S Bach's Suite No.1 for Unaccompanied Cello Sunday in Norristown. Yes, it was everything I thought it would...