Words and Music

Mark Twain Dept .: Sam Clemens gave a talk in Fort Plain, NY, on December 19, 1868, part of what he termed his “American Vandals” tour, cons...

From the Vault Dept. : It now seems remarkable that we had John Cage hanging out in the area for a while, but it shouldn’t be a surprise. Ne...

From the Vault Dept .: I discovered Rosemary Clooney during her 1977 tour with Bing Crosby, when they performed at what was then the Uris Th...

YOU’D THINK THAT the sweeping orchestral complexity of Berlioz’s music would resist reduction, but his buddy Liszt turned the Symphonie Fant...

From the Bookshelf Dept. : Thomas Berger’s penultimate novel, Best Friends , again visited the realm of domestic treachery previously limned...

From the Food Vault Dept. : The Lake Placid Lodge I visited in 1996 is not the place you’ll visit now. The property has continued to develop...

From the Vault Dept .: How loyal are you to your country? That was the nasty little question essentially asked of balladeer Richard Dyer-Ben...

From the Food Vault Dept. : It’s the time of year to celebrate the tubers and such, so I dug up this piece I wrote nearly fifteen years ago ...

Guest Blogger Dept. : I was delighted to spend time recently with Nat Benchley, grandson of the humorist whose work I revere, and to discove...

From the Classical Vault Dept .: Eleven years ago, soprano Kiri Te Kanawa bid farewell to the performing stage with a tour that stopped in S...

An appropriate-for-the-day song I co-wrote with Tom Savoy for our musical adaptation of Booth Tarkington's "Beasley's Christmas...

CHEF ANA SORTUN graduated from La Varenne in Paris, but her interest in Middle Eastern food has taken her beyond that classical French foun...

Guest Blogger Dept. : We return, as we often should, to the fables of George Ade, this one a lengthier opus limning the hazards of succumbin...

From the Holiday Vault Dept .: Christmastime is here, by golly; disapproval would be folly ... so here’s a review I wrote of a brass quintet...

PIANIST SIMONE DINNERSTEIN set the stage well before she entered. Her piano sat on a darkened stage at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre,...

THERE’S A SCENE in the 1947 movie “Carnegie Hall” in which cellist Gregor Piatigorsky performs Saint-Saëns’s “The Swan” while surrounded by ...

PREACHING PRECAUTION isn’t often the same as practicing it. The “ounce of prevention” principle, seemingly instilled in us at birth, has lon...

From the Vault Dept. : One of a series of liner notes I wrote for the sadly defunct Dorian Recordings label, although I swear my involvement...

Guest Blogger Dept .: Here’s Robert Benchley, back to set us straight about the travails of correspondence, which clearly was in a parlous s...

OUR THAI CUSINE-INSPIRED Thanksgiving dinner had a preparation of khao soi , a wonderful coconut milk-based soup, as its centerpiece. Turkey...