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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: And about time, too

February 26, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Says Household Opera:

During intermission at the Cecilia Bartoli concert I attended this weekend, I ended up talking to the woman two seats over. (She’d overheard me talking about the program with my friend T., who came with me.) Did I play anything, she asked. I said no. “You certainly seem to know a lot about music — I don’t know much of anything about it,” she replied. I said something about having an inexpert but occasionally obsessive interest. Then the guy on my other side, who’d leaned over to ask if he could borrow my opera-glasses from time to time during the second half of the concert, answered a question of T.’s about horn-playing in far more technical detail than I ever could have produced. I was somewhere in the middle — literally — between “I don’t know much about music” and “I can tell you all about crooks.” All of which is to say, I should get over my phobia of being seen as an amateur and actually blog about music every so often….

Read the whole thing here.

I couldn’t agree more. Please do. Intelligent amateurism is a big part of what blogging is all about. And the same goes for you, Mr. TMFTML.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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