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Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
by Christopher Little Herewith, the first of several posts on Louisville, which will host the national meeting of the American Musicological Society in November. It's a happening place.Well, not...
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(Not to be confused with SMTV Live.)Our chums at the Society for Music Theory have unveiled no. 1 of their Videocast Journal of the Society for Music Theory:“Repetition & Musicality,” by Elizabeth...
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Harvard Calling
Deborah BordaWe applaud the good sense of Harvard University in engaging Deborah Borda, and of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in granting her a “sabbatical”—she says she's pausing to reflect on her first...
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Dr. Sarmast's Music School
Ahmed Naser SarmastWe learn from multiple sources of the continuing recovery of Ahmad Sarmast, the Afgahni / Australian musicologist and educator who was injured in a suicide attack in Kabul on 11...
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LA-land
OK, we confess to finding the following, from this morning's LA Times, to be the most perplexing (“confusing,” the students would say) passage about musicology we remember reading: Because laws when...
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Blurred Lines, Ur-Lines, and Color Lines
by Robert FinkNothing puts musicology in the headlines like a big, juicy verdict in a musical copyright case. And they don’t come much juicier than the 7.4 million dollar judgment handed down last week...
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The Pillage of Europe's Bells
Plundered bells on the Hamburg dock in Germany, August 1945National Archives and Records AdministrationThe centenary of UC Berkeley's landmark campanile (formally Sather Tower) and carillon was...
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Happy Birthday, Handel and Haydn Society!
by Teresa M. NeffMarch 24, 2015, proclaims the Mayor, is H+H Day in Boston, just one part of a year-long celebration of the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Handel and Haydn Society in...
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Great Escape
on Normandy’s coast a century ago, Claude Debussy fled the war and composed his final piano masterpiece by Sudip Bose This essay appears in the Spring 2015 issue of The American Scholar and its...
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Blurry
by Joanna DemersJusticeLos Angeles County CourthouseThe Williams v. Bridgeport [i.e., Bridgeport Music, Inc.] decision, which orders “Blurred Lines”-co-writers Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams to...
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Sad, Lonely Weeping
by Dale Cockrell Note: Our sister Society for American Music held its 2015 annual meeting in Sacramento, 4–8 March. Among the featured events was a concert by Anonymous 4 with guest...
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Weighing In on Copyright
by John Philip Sousa Anent the “Blurred Lines” controversy, an excerpt from Sousa's (possibly prescient) rant “The Menace of Mechanical Music,”Appleton's Magazine 8 (1906), 278–84.And now a word on a...
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Musicology and the Entrepreneurship of Ideas (I)
by Christopher J. SmithPart 1 of 2 parts. It is a truism that traditional support networks for both the “highbrow” and “lowbrow” performing arts are disappearing; that organizations’ social and...
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Musicology and the Entrepreneurship of Ideas (II)
by Christopher J. SmithPart 2 of 2 parts. In July 2007, in a blog-comment, I argued for the philosophic and practical value of such intentional outreach amongst one’s colleagues and peers:Something I...
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JAMS 68/1: Spring 2015
Volume 68, no. 1, of the Journal of the American Musicological Society—or JAMS, as it is familiarly known—is now live online. All of the articles contain embedded multimedia.Subscriptions to the...
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Ruth Tatlow on Mrs. Bach
What seems to us (and many others) a cogent and measured assessment by Ruth Tatlow of the Mrs Bach brouhaha (see Tim Cavanaugh's essay, our post of 13 November 2014) appears in no. 10 of the online...
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Carla Zecher Named Executive Director, Renaissance Society of America
Carla Zecher, a member of the American Musicological Society, has been named Executive Director of the Renaissance Society of America effective July 2015. She is presently Director of the Center for...
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Lilacs
Library of Congress1When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. Ever-returning...
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Brahms, Clara, and Op. 78.
by Paul BerryNOTE: The following excerpt from Brahms Among Friends (Oxford UP, 2014) treats the Violin Sonata, op. 78, and its connections with Clara Schumann and the death of her son Felix. Opus 78 is...
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New Acquisitions at the Newberry
Here is a selection of the recent acquisitions in music made possible by The Newberry’s Howard Mayer Brown / Roger Weiss Rare Book Fund. This fund was established as part of the bequest of Howard Mayer...
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