A Lost Song by Aaron Copland
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Memories, Music, People on May 18th, 2008 No Comments »
Archive for the 'People' Category
My life-changing 1944 introduction to Aaron Copland
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Memory Lane, Music, People on May 17th, 2008 No Comments »
When YouTube gives you a horn, you toot it, right…?
Posted in Letter from Berlin, People, Politics on May 11th, 2008 No Comments »
My Life as a Self-Determined Goddam Kraut
Posted in Commonplace Book, Letter from Berlin, Life and culture, People, Reflections on Jan 15th, 2008 1 Comment »
Culinary possibilities have enormously improved since I originally arrived in Munich (directly from two years in Paris yet) 56 years ago last fall. During my five Munich years my frustrated gourmet’s heart leapt up when the Guide Michelin itself, which I’ve sometimes thought of as perhaps the only incorruptible institution in la douce France, [...]
A note on Copland’s setting of "I Bought me a Cat"
Posted in Life and culture, Memories, Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 30th, 2007 3 Comments »
[This afternoon at the Komische Oper zu Berlin, the American baritone Kevin Deas sang this captivating little song Aaron Copland adapted as one of his "Old American Songs", and when I got home I emailed him this addendum:]
Dear Mr. Deas,
as Berlin correspondent for www.MusicalAmerica.com I attended - and enjoyed - your concert this afternoon at [...]
A substantial addendum on Stockhausen (at 70)
Posted in Life and culture, Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 9th, 2007 2 Comments »
[From my hard disk I've excavated some Stockhauseniana I put together in 1998, which has definitely not lost its relevance to this inordinately intricate personality:]
Although Karlheinz Stockhausen at 70 has probably become globally the most famous living German composer (his only rival: Hans Werner Henze), comparatively few people actually know his music. During the early [...]
An incongruously larky footnote on Stockhausen
Posted in Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 8th, 2007 No Comments »
This afternoon I actually started a bloggery, skimming the cream off the many times over the past half-century when Karlheinz Stockhausen’s path and mine crossed, but eventually I gave up on it for what I’d originally thought of as a casual stroll down Memory Lane unexpectedly touched off such an avalanche of recollections, from locations [...]
How Aaron Copland came by that odd surname
Posted in Life and culture, Memory Lane, Music, People on Dec 1st, 2007 No Comments »
Howard Pollack’s 690-page biography Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man documents in some detail (the index cites me seven times) one of my life’s most enriching friendships with that almost saintly man, which began soon after I emerged from the University of Texas at 19 as a brand-new Bachelor Musicae and [...]
Tallulah Bankhead on Norman Mailer (1948)
Posted in Life and culture, Memory Lane, Music, People on Nov 10th, 2007 No Comments »
Young Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead turned him into an overnight celebrity but it appeared early enough for its publisher to have serious problems with a pungent monosyllable that peppered the manuscript. Mailer had written naturalistically about the robust young Americans in uniform he’d known during World War II, and for him [...]
Not simulated drowning - it IS drowning!
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Life and culture, People, Politics on Nov 9th, 2007 No Comments »
The online magazine salon has scored some notable coups in the field of investigative journalism, but I recall none that’s so impressed and inexpressibly horrified me as this one, about the barbarous torture euphemistically called “waterboarding”, which the Bush-Cheney criminal conspiracy not only condones and practises but also inexorably defends as indispensable “under present circumstances”.
What [...]
