Inspiring Excitement and Passion about History and the Humanities
On Tuesday of this week we went to our pediatrician’s office to pick up paperwork for Hannah’s labs, which we needed to get done before her appointment next week (I lagged on doing them and then lost the paperwork – typical me). Instead of the calm doctor’s office, things were really somber, and they were…
If any of you are into early music, and you have sirius radio, there is a wonderful program called The Millennium of Music, on Symphony Hall, channel 76, at 11am eastern/8am pacific on Sunday mornings. I generally catch it in snippets when I’m on my way to walk Hannah at the lake. The host, Robert…
I’ve talked a lot about the Old Music I love – the English choral evensong tradition, and Renaissance polyphony from the Flemish composers like Gombert, and even the Grandaddy of them all, Palestrina. But what many casual choral enthusiasts don’t realize is that there is a huge upsurge in amazing choral music being composed now…
In my quest to turn my library completely digital and get rid of all my paper books, I’m finally catching up on some of the books that have been on my shelf for years, and one of those “finally” books is Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age by Fiona Maddocks. There’s a theme…
Henry Purcell is a Grandaddy in the world of early music. There are a couple of Big Names that most people who are into music, but not early music, have heard of, and Purcell is always one of them. He lived in the late 17th century, and was right on the border, getting baroque music…
I spent the weekend working with the Golden Bridge Choir in Los Angeles; a new choir formed by Suzi Digby (Lady Eatwell, and a choral goddess in the UK) to explore the musical links between the Golden Age of the Tudor/Elizabethan composers and the current choral Renaissance that Southern California is experiencing. The choir performance…
One of the many things I lurve about autumn is that all my favorite choral groups start releasing Christmas albums. I can’t get enough Christmas music. Though with the caveat that I don’t mean “I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” kinds of Christmas music, but rather the good O Come O Come Emmanuel, and Lo, How a Rose…
Something that definitely needs to be included in any Museum of Things Heather Loves is choral music; specifically early choral music (ie before Bach) and even more specifically (because let’s drill down further, shall we?) early Anglican choral music. One of the reasons I consider myself Episcopalian (the American version of Church of England-you couldn’t…
Recently I went to a LA Chamber Orchestra talk on the history of Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto, a work that is famous for throwing out the rulebook of the concerto form (and also having some bits that sound so much like Chopin, it’s eerie). The conductor mentioned a term I hadn’t heard before – Diabolus in…
I’m a big fan of baroque music that doesn’t require a lot of thought and concentration. The equivalent of somebody like, say, James Taylor. He’s soothing, and nice to have on while you’re reading or something, because he isn’t very demanding. He’s going to Carolina and you don’t need to know much else other than…