Words and Music

February 26, 2005  |  Photo by B. A. Nilsson

“The discrepancy between the conductor’s and the soloist’s attitude toward the score was so vast and disturbing . . . that it seems hard to...

Wings Have a Prayer Dept. : During a 2001 tour with the musical "A Tale of Cinderella," which I performed with the NYS Theatre In...

From the Tech Vault Dept .: Please don't try to make it through this piece. It's four thousand words explaining digital audio techn...

From the Recent Past Dept .: A Metroland essay from a couple of years ago, which failed to win me a single dinner invitation. Oh well.  ...

From the Cradle Dept .: Here’s the 100th item for this blog. To celebrate I’ve dipped about as far back as I can go in my published writings...

Ade was a Chicago newspaperman at the dawn of the 20th Century, and made his name with the 1901 collection Fables in Slang . Here's a no...

Read the Manual Dept .: We seem headed for an early spring, when Nature gets all meltish and randy. Here's a piece I wrote a couple of ...

From the Vault : An ambitious classical-music website was launched in 2001, when andante.com offered essays, reviews, streaming music, and...

DESCRIBING THE LARVAE of Brachyceran flies, Brian Handwerk revealed the surprising benefit these creatures offer in a 2003 article for Nat...

Across the U.S.A. Dept .: Fearing the loss of any claim to hippiedom, my wife and I took a cross-country drive 23 years ago. We spent a mon...

LET’S GET ONE THING out of the way. There are times in one’s life when one suffers such a buildup of nasal excrescence that one has no ch...

Vintage Showroom Dept .: This piece, from a 1987 issue of Metroland , enjoyed some reprints in other alternative weeklies. Sure, much of th...

Wellfleet Harbor, Aug. 2010  |  Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Heartbreak of Rejection Dept. : I wrote program notes for several CDs issued on the Dorian Recordings label when it was based in Troy, NY, ...

Old Numbers Never Die Dept .: Re-reading the review I wrote about the short-lived restaurant D'Lites got me admiring the shortsightedn...

Across the U.S.A. Dept .: When my wife and I crisscrossed the USA in 1989, our California stops were the Napa Valley, San Francisco, and, t...

THIS WEEK I HIT the halfway point in a novel I’ve been working on for a while. It’s not the first such effort of mine, but it’s one that I s...

From the Food-Review Archives Dept. : When I review restaurants these days, I rarely give an all-out assault on a place. If it's a bad e...

THE CHALLENGE OF “Hora Staccato” is to make the long, descending phrase that gives the piece its title sound smooth and crisp. It’s one of a...