The following is a guest post by Music Reference Specialist Lisa Shiota. “It always makes me smile when the Library of Congress asks me to keep my sketches for their collection. When I get through I don’t have any sketches—they’re all rubbed out. I write an awful lot of notes that don’t stay.” ~Walter Piston, …
In the Muse has been known to make unlikely connections along the musical spectrum, from Lawrence Welk to the Velvet Underground, from Paul Williams to DJ Shadow. And if you have a second, we’ll explain how the disco-era novelty singles of Rick Dees, (the bell-bottomed Jekyll and Hyde of “Disco Duck;” “Bigfoot,” which imagines that the …
The following is a guest post by Reference Specialist Caitlin Miller, who will soon be joining me as a regular blogger for In the Muse. About every six months or so, the Music Division welcomes a new exhibit into the Performing Arts Reading Room foyer. We are currently thrilled to host an exhibit dedicated to …
Tickets are now available for the following concerts in the Coolidge Auditorium. All concerts are free but require tickets available from Ticketmaster. Click on the artist’s name below to reserve yours. Thursday, October 21 @8:00 pm Talich Quartet Masterworks performed by the second incarnation of one of the world’s finest quartets – the epitome of …
September always brings back memories of my school days, when I walked to class barefoot four miles in chin-high snow (winter coming dreadfully early in those times), dodging packs of rabid wolves and feral children. But the modern age provides you, the reader, with sundry opportunities to learn from the comfort of your own coffee …
Composer Roger Reynolds was born July 18, 1934 in Detroit, Michigan. Ciro G. Scotto, in his 1992 volume Contemporary Composers, wrote that Reynolds “has created a body of work that encompasses nearly every major musical development in the 20th century.” In an article written for the Library of Congress Information Bulletin in 2002, Senior Music Specialist …
Followers of In the Muse will be pleased to know that a number of Music Division events covered in these virtual pages are now available on the Library of Congress’s Webcasts page. A Conversation with Dafnis Prieto and Larry Appelbaum A performance by the Dafnis Prieto Si O Si Quartet. Music and the Brain: Stage …
Modern music lovers with a penchant for the Baroque may assume that the much-loved timbre of the harpsichord has been popular ever since its development in the 15th century. But according to Grove Music Online, the instrument fell almost entirely out of favor by the early 19th century, owing to the emergence of the piano. …
Pianist-composer Uri Caine has played with a veritable who’s-who of jazz, from hard bop legend Hank Mobley to soul-jazz leader Grover Washington to avant-garde icon John Zorn, from scat singer Annie Ross to the man who has been described as “James Brown trapped in Don Knotts’ body,” Arto Lindsay. He has performed Duke Ellington numbers …
“It would be nice to hear someone say, ‘Look at that gas station in the moonlight. It’s pure John Adams.’ ” — John Adams, composer of Nixon in China. [1] New Yorker music critic Alex Ross recently blogged about two different composers named John Adams, distinguished by their middle names of Luther and Coolidge. This common …