Reads tagged with “music”
Bach and the Cosmos of Belonging: Michael Pollan on the Medicinal Power of Music
“Opened to the music, I became first the strings… and then the breeze of sound flowing past as it crossed the lips of the instrument and went out to meet the world, beginning its lonely transit of the universe.”
The Shape of Music: Maurice Sendak’s Insightful Forgotten Meditation on Fantasy, Feeling, and the Key to Great Storytelling
“Fantasy and feeling lie deeper than words… and both demand a more profound, more biological expression, the primitive expression of music.”
There Are Infinitely Many Kinds of Beautiful Lives: A Reading from “Figuring” Accompanied by Yo-Yo Ma, Benefitting Refugee Children
A reading from “Figuring” with original music by Yo-Yo Ma, a stunning rendition of the 19-century parlor song “Beautiful Dreamer” by Esperanza Spalding, and a family of friends speaking out against injustice in the universal language of sympathy.
Langston Hughes’s Ardent Public Fan Letter to the Young Nina Simone
“She is strange. So are the plays of Brendan Behan, Jean Genet, LeRoi Jones, and Bertholt Brecht. She is far-out, and at the same time common. So are raw eggs in Worcestershire and The Connection.”
The Jazz of Physics: Cosmologist and Saxophonist Stephon Alexander on Decoding the Song of the Universe
“It is less about music being scientific and more about the universe being musical.”
Favorite Books of 2019
From the hidden universe beneath our feet to delight as a countercultural force of courage and resistance, by way of Patti Smith, Toni Morrison, and the Greek myths.
How to Find Your Artistic Voice: Ben Folds on Empathy, Creativity, and the Courage to Know Yourself
“What an artist has to offer is obvious to just about anyone else but the artist him- or herself.”
How to Get Back Up and Keep Running: Amanda Palmer on Making Art When Life Unmakes You
“Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans. And for an artist, art is what happens when you let your bizarre, unbidden, unpredictable life steer you into creating things that you weren’t expecting to make.”
The Everlasting Self: U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s Soulful Meditation on the Looping, Haunting Mystery of Being
“A collaborative condition: / Gathered, shed, spread, then / Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love…”
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