Words and Music

THE MORE IN TOUCH YOU ARE with your inner monologues, the easier it is to read James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Easier, but still not easy. An auton...

I DON’T REMEMBER when I discovered MAD, but I know which piece of theirs first shook me out of my suburban complacency. Titled “The National...

DRUM CRASHES OPEN THE PIECE, giving way to the low brass and a rising figure then picked up by the strings. It seems to dissipate in some fi...

AN APPOINTMENT BOOK sits open on my desk, its two overview pages for the month of June staring back at me with pencilled appointments fillin...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : Martha Argerich turns 83 on June 5, so let’s salute her with a look back at performance she gave in Saratog...

IT’S EASY TO OVERLOOK the outings that take you not very far. What counts as close? Living as we do in the rural wilds of New York’s farming...

The Bard on the Boards Dept .: Here’s a pair of book reviews that turned up in a recently discovered pile of clippings, and it’s one of the ...

From the Vines Dept .: Sometimes your past lurks in old bankers boxes. I opened one recently expecting to see only books and found in additi...

IT STARTED WITH a Criterion Collection closet picks video that featured Justine Triet, a director most recently known for the movie “Anatomy...

Guest Blogger Dept. : Not surprisingly, George Ade has something to say on this matter. I’m not exactly sure what this matter is, but let’s ...

IT BEGAN HAPPENING around Hallowe’en, which is why nobody noticed it at first. Then it became one of those wryly amusing end-of-the-news sto...

WITH NO SLIGHT INTENDED to my family’s generosity, the ultimate Christmas present arrived early, and it came from Mosaic Records. Ten CDs de...

More from the Concert Vault Dept. : While perusing some 1987 material, I found the following. The piece is an “advance,” written to promote ...

From the Musical Vault Dept .: Long before Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute installed it shiny new performance centr (EMPAC), experimental a...

From the Food Vault Dept .: Mention of our steakhouse meal on board the Queen Mary 2 set me to recalling some of the places in that category...

BY THIS TIME, we were so accustomed to packing and moving on that the finish of our stay in London seemed no sadder than that of any of our ...

From the Concert Vault Dept .: I’ve reviewed them in these pages before , but it was a treat to discover one I’d forgotten about – especiall...

From the Record Shelf Dept. : I looked this up online to remind myself of the CD set and – hey! What a handsome job of packaging! I was sent...

From the Vault Dept .: What was I pondering in print 40 years ago? I had just started writing for Albany’s Metroland Magazine, before it bec...

WE ARRIVED in the nerve-center of England with very little planned. The evening meal is always a good starting point, so we took a walk in t...