Excerpts from my most recent “More than Music” show on NPR: “Finding the Common Good – Charles Ives at 150”: Ives is a self-made Connecticut Yankee, born in 1874, who’s all about seeking common purpose, common sentiment, common good. So at a moment when our nation seems to be coming apart, Ives speaks to us about the things that hold us together – … [Read more...] about Abraham Lincoln, Ragtime, and Charles Ives on NPR
Uncategorized
Remembering Teddy
Teddy died last Sunday after a short, swift illness, probably cancer. He was eleven years old. My seminal Teddy memory: in the kitchen, during his early adulthood, I off-handedly said: “Mommy’s coming.” Teddy quivered with an anticipatory elation that consumed every particle of his being. This was my first experience of his bewildering linguistic acumen, and of an … [Read more...] about Remembering Teddy
Lawrence Tibbett and the Fate of American Opera Today
Today’s online edition of “The American Scholar” carries my essay on Lawrence Tibbett and how he "prophesied today's Metropolitan Opera crisis." You can read it here. An extract follows: In a recent New York Times “guest essay,” Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s embattled general manager, expresses the naïve hope that “new operas by living composers” can make … [Read more...] about Lawrence Tibbett and the Fate of American Opera Today
“Rachmaninoff In His Own Words” – A Man of Firm Identity and Principle
A dear friend of mine died recently of a sudden heart attack. I discovered that the only music I found consoling was the slow movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto – the 1929 recording with the composer at the piano, accompanied by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. I am of course aware that many people find this piece maudlin. But Rachmaninoff the … [Read more...] about “Rachmaninoff In His Own Words” – A Man of Firm Identity and Principle
“Dear Daddy” — What Kind of Man Was Charles Ives?
What kind of man was Charles Ives? Based on the testimony of those who knew and met him, I would say: a great man. And the greatest such testimonial was left by his daughter, Edie, in a letter she wrote to her father in 1942 on the occasion of his sixty-eighth birthday. I discovered Edie’s letter thanks to Tom Owens’s Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives (2007). Edie's … [Read more...] about “Dear Daddy” — What Kind of Man Was Charles Ives?