Robert Schumann in 1839,the year before is marriage to Clara.

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 scheduled for January 27, the same day I was planning to attend Fine Art Music Company's second event in its "War of the Romantics" series.

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

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, pianists Rollin Wilber and Kasia Salwinski presented another of their signature theme programs at the gemütlich Ivy Hall in Philadelphia. The subject this time o…

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 study that combines literary history, musical analysis, and aesthetic philosophy. It's an endlessly fascinating resource and a book I'll be returning to often.

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

A compact, purposeful signature. John Ashberysigned this copy of Girls on the Run for mein Philadelphia in April 1999.  

Several years ago, after reading John Ashbery's "Some Trees," I wrote the following poem, which is a direct imitation. The subject matter is mine, as is the negativity, but the form is more or less Ashbery's, with emphasis on enjambment and near rhymes.

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 Church in Bala Cynwyd, the string quartet contingent of the Elysian Camerata introduced me to the music of Erwin Schulhoff, the Czech who died at the Wülzb…

The crew of the fine Art Music Company performs Brahms'  Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor Op. 25 Sunday at the Ethical Society in Philadelphia. Playing are, from left, Jonathan Moser, violin;  Kasia Marzec-Salwinski, piano; Adelya Shagidullina, viola; and Michal Schmidt, cello. Rollin Wilber d…

Steve Kramer performs J.S Bach'sSuite No.1 for UnaccompaniedCello Sunday in Norristown.

The cellist Steve Kramer will perform three of Bach's cello suites Sunday in Norristown. Here's a link to my article on the event. It was written for a general readership, so there isn't too much about the music. Yes, the guy on the theater board is really hoping one day to bring a symphony …

The microtonalist composer and theorist Johnny Reinhard invited me to his New York apartment Sunday to hear a new recording, which he is producing, of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. There must be dozens of recordings of the piece. What makes this one unique is that it involves two pianists ―…

The most redundant phrase I know

The most redundant phrase I know:

The Lady with the Lamp looks out to sea

Russia went through hell in the 20th century (at present it appears to have graduated into purgatory), and its many great artists bore witness to its suffering, either by confronting it directly; or by dreaming, like the early Christians, of the peace beyond the apocalypse; or by simply gett…

For Marjory

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the director of Choral Arts Philadelphia was at a loss to explain the presence of the sopranino recorder  in Bach's Cantata BWV 96, Christ her einige Gottessohn. Bach always assigned extra-musical meanings to his instrumentation, of course, and the direct…

Congratulations and thank you to the Fine Art Music Company for its exhilarating program of American music this weekend in Philadelphia. The performances, held Saturday evening at Ivy Hall and Sunday afternoon at the Ethical Society, were timed -- intentionally, I am told -- to correspond wi…

Wer sagt, die Deutschen haben keinen Sinn für Humor?

I suppose I'm going to have to weigh on on this whole Bob Dylan-Nobel Prize thing, but since Dylan himself hasn't acknowledged  it yet, I haven't felt too much pressure. According to