Words and Music

From the Tech Vault Dept .: I was a beta tester for the very first version of Finale, one of the top two music-engraving programs. It’s now ...

From the Bookshelf Dept. : British writer Jonathan Coe attracted attention in the U.S. with the publication of The Winshaw Legacy (known in...

Across the USA Dept. : Time to park this bus, don’t you think? Here’s the wrap-up to the series of pieces – now strewn across this blog – th...

Guest Blogger: Heywood Broun . Here’s how Broun is introduced in the original volume, which also is titled Nonsenseorship , an anti-Volstead...

From the Vault Dept .: By the time I moved to Schenectady in 1980, Ruby’s Diner already was a fixture. Here’s a piece I wrote about it in 19...

9 February 2013 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

From the Vault Dept. : As Albany’s Capital Repertory Company prepares to present another premiere, this of the musical Single Girls Guide (...

From the Vault Dept. : In a blog post last year around this time, I expostulated on the life and career of mouth-organ virtuoso Larry Adler...

Guest Blogger: Dorothy Parker . A stalwart of the Algonquin Round Table, as fierce and precise in her prose as she was in her fiction and po...

From the Vault Dept. : How quickly the future rockets into the past! Here are some prognostications from 1997. Technology changed far more q...

Across the U.S.A. Dept .: My penultimate posting from the series of pieces I wrote in 1989 celebrating a cross-country car trip with my wife...

From the Jukebox Dept. : As I labor to finish a review of the musical “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” which finishes a run at Proctors The...

Recording the St. Petersburg Quartet in Troy, NY 6 June 2001 | Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Musical Stages Dept .: Loudon Wainwright III performed in Albany not long ago, as he tends to do at least once a year. Here’s my Metroland r...

Ardor Dept .: Let me show my love (and sling-free right arm) by offering dating advice to men for Valentine’s Day.                        ...

“BUT YOU KNOW it’s going to end the same way again!” my father would complain. “His face comes at the screen and the bars close across it!” ...

From the Vault Dept .: For many years, no Troy Music Hall concert could begin without Fire Marshall John Tilton’s no-smoking warning. “Fire ...

From the Bookshelf Dept .: As a writer for Esquire and the NY Times , Gay Talese made his name with colorful, well-researched articles about...

Guest Blogger: George Ade . Keeping the English language safe and pure always has been a priority for bluenoses, who found their beezers sui...

THE RECENT PROCTORS THEATRE visit of the hit show “Million Dollar Quartet” reminded me that the same sum had been bruited six years earlier ...