Another Study Equates Higher Academic Performance With Music Lessons

MUSIC Posted: December 4, 2013 7:44 am

While it doesn’t provide a definitive answer, new research from Germany presents evidence that improved academic performance truly is a result of musical training.

An ace production

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review Writers Theatre’s webcast of Anna Ziegler’s The Last Match. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Chicago’s Writers Theatre, America’s foremost regional drama company, which webcast a solo... Read more

AJBlog: About Last Night Published on: 2021-05-07
Replay: John Guare talks about The House of Blue Leaves

John Guare talks about the genesis of The House of Blue Leaves in a 1999 interview: (This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each... Read more

AJBlog: About Last Night Published on: 2021-05-07
Almanac: Cesare Pavese on sin

“If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be!” Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living Continue reading Almanac: Cesare Pavese... Read more

AJBlog: About Last Night Published on: 2021-05-07
The Diversity of Performing Arts Audiences: Weighing Organizational Factors and Business Decisions

A year ago this month, Zannie Voss and Jill Robinson produced one of the first action-oriented research reports about COVID-19’s impact on arts organizations. In the report, titled In it for the... Read more

AJBlog: Measure for Measure Published on: 2021-05-06
Almanac: W.H. Auden on sin

“All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.” W.H. Auden, A Certain World Continue reading Almanac: W.H. Auden on sin at About Last Night.... Read more

AJBlog: About Last Night Published on: 2021-05-06
Snapshot: Charles Laughton appears on TV with Abbott and Costello

Charles Laughton delivers the Gettysburg Address on an episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour. He is “introduced” by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. This episode was originally telecast live by NBC on April... Read more

AJBlog: About Last Night Published on: 2021-05-05
Almanac: F. Scott Fitzgerald on Hollywood

“Isn’t Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.”... Read more

AJBlog: About Last Night Published on: 2021-05-05
Lookback: sixty-one years, sixty-eight films

From 2017: I’ve decided to play the game that’s currently going around the web and post a list of my favorite films released in each year of my life to date…. Read... Read more

AJBlog: About Last Night Published on: 2021-05-04
Almanac: F. Scott Fitzgerald on a heat wave

“In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Continue reading Almanac: F. Scott Fitzgerald on a heat wave at... Read more

AJBlog: About Last Night Published on: 2021-05-04
John Butler Yeats’s Sublime Ignorance

'I had in my only philosophy a faith founded like that of Socrates upon the basis of my conscious ignorance—it is a sort of sublime optimism, and I am very satisfied with... Read more

AJBlog: Straight|Up Published on: 2021-05-03
Once When High on Hash (Two Versions)

Baudelaire drew his self-portrait under the influence of hashish (ca. 1842). As for me, 'I wore no topcoat ... / and no comet struck / me from a morbid sky ... '... Read more

AJBlog: Straight|Up Published on: 2021-05-03
Just because: Marian Anderson sings Schubert’s “Ave Maria”

Marian Anderson sings Schubert’s “Ave Maria” on The Ed Sullivan Show. This episode was originally telecast live by CBS on April 13, 1952: (This is the latest in a series of arts- and... Read more

AJBlog: About Last Night Published on: 2021-05-03
Almanac: Somerset Maugham on the power of music

“Music is queer. Its power seems unrelated to the other affections of man, so that a person who is elsewise perfectly commonplace may have for it an extreme and delicate sensitiveness.” Somerset... Read more

AJBlog: About Last Night Published on: 2021-05-03
Lynda Hartigan, Peabody Essex Museum’s Passed-Over Deputy Director, Belatedly Gets the Top Spot

Was this a case of glass-ceiling syndrome? Two years ago, when the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, named Brian Kennedy, then director of the Toledo Museum, to succeed its distinguished longtime director,... Read more

AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published on: 2021-05-02
Supervert’s Translation of ‘To Arthur Rimbaud’

Your blast calculations were right on the money, my boy the armored wall of poetic imagination collapsed under your hand But what the hell happened to your right leg? The knee is... Read more

AJBlog: Straight|Up Published on: 2021-05-02
Charles Grode Share the Impact of Collaboration

Charles Grode, President & Executive Director of the Merit School of Music shares about the importance and impact of collaboration between arts organizations.... Read more

AJBlog: Aaron Dworkin Published on: 2021-05-01
Samuel Beckett: ‘Spring’

'The strange, gentle pleasures I feel at the approach of spring are impossible of expression, and if that is a sentence inviting ridicule, so much the worse for me.' — Samuel Beckett... Read more

AJBlog: Straight|Up Published on: 2021-05-01
Becoming ‘Nobody’

“This seems about right at any time but especially in the time of #MeToo.” — Yakov Boyarsky... Read more

AJBlog: Straight|Up Published on: 2021-04-29
CultureGrrl, the Metropolitan Museum & the Bomb Scare

Let me cut to the chase before embarking on a long digression: At this writing, the Metropolitan Museum is safe and so am I. That said, for a brief time during my... Read more

AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published on: 2021-04-28
Pandemic in India Pradip Choudhuri, R.I.P.

"He was perhaps one of the most reliable links that Bengal and India had to the counter-culture movements across America and Europe. His lifelong friend, French poet and collagist Bruno Sourdin called... Read more

AJBlog: Straight|Up Published on: 2021-04-28