Skip to main content

Music Stories



In another month or so, I'll be composing (for another blog) a list of the top five big Music-related stories of 2012. Five is a good number for this, because my entries for JustSheetMusic tend to be around 1,000 words each, and it is difficult to say anything worthwhile about any one such story in less than 200 words.

Perhaps I will get out of the way, through some sort of unlisted mention, the fact that the BBC has been torn by a sex scandal around the activities of the late TV host Jimmy Savile. This is a "music" story only because of the nature of the program that made Savile famous, Top of the Pops.  That isn't enough for my list.

The actual stories may be listed from fun to somber, thus:

1. The Ravinia Festival this year teamed up Patti LuPone with Patricia Racette.

2. Rihannas new album, Unapologetic, which seems to have incited polarized reactions.
Legends, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Bruce Sp., also gave us new albums.

3. Fiona Apple is back in the arena. She did her Idler Wheel tour this year.

4. The usual quota of deaths of musical figures. Whitney Houston left us this year, as did doo-wop legend Cleveland Duncan, and Soul Train host Don Cornelius.

5.  Members of a punk rock group, Pussy Riot, (pictured above) have been imprisoned in Russia.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
9 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
17 comments
Read more