I've been a fan of the BBC's Desert Island Disc series for as long as I can remember. The original premise was that if you were cast away on a desert island (presumably one with a working electrical power grid), which eight recordings would you choose to bring with you? Across the entirety of musical … Continue reading The Friday Symposium: Fifteen Albums
Category: Reviews and Musings
The Friday Symposium: Music and Cocktails for the Last Days of Summer
The last days of summer don't mean as much as they used to these days. While some, no doubt, will board their last train back to the City on Monday afternoon, or otherwise brave the traffic and the dreaded LIE, come Tuesday morning I will still find myself seated here, 100 miles from the office … Continue reading The Friday Symposium: Music and Cocktails for the Last Days of Summer
The Friday Symposium: Thomas Tallis and White Châteauneuf-du-Pape
On this edition of the Friday Symposium, we go even further back in music history to motets composed by Thomas Tallis. One of my Desert Island Discs is certainly the Tallis Scholars' recording of Spem in Alium, along with other Tallis compositions. https://open.spotify.com/album/69n01dGwqZ5d5b1GITfP7G?si=I9ki400PSXy2UlHN957LzA One of the most complex and ethereal compositions of its or any … Continue reading The Friday Symposium: Thomas Tallis and White Châteauneuf-du-Pape
The Friday Symposium: Bach and The Martini
Leave it to academia to turn something wonderful into something dreadful. When most people hear the world "symposium" today, they think of a bunch of talking heads sitting on a podium massaging their own egos. In the Ancient World, however, a symposium was decidedly more fun--after all, the word symposium is derived from the Greek … Continue reading The Friday Symposium: Bach and The Martini
Searching for Truth: The Conversations
It was the Moonlight Sonata that started my obsession with musical Conversations. And no, it wasn't the Mozart link described in the prior entry. It is easy to find how Beethoven influenced subsequent composers. You can jump only a few decades forward to Frederic Chopin, for example: Ludwig van Beethoven, Sonata No. 14, Op. 27, … Continue reading Searching for Truth: The Conversations
A Gertus History of Music 