It’s Time To Start Teaching Again and I Want Your Advice
July
15th,
2015
Thank you all for the wonderful submissions made at my request last week to name my next The Great Courses survey. I will select my 5-10 favorites and present them to you later this week for your vote. I will deliver the results to The Great Courses with the hope that they will indeed let…
New Course Coming Soon
July
9th,
2015
It has been a long time since I last blogged. I have an excuse (sort of) which I’d share, and in doing so request your help. I have been writing a new, 24-lecture course for The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, and have only today – this morning, in fact – finished the first draft. I…
How To Listen And Understand Great Music at 37,000 Feet!
April
8th,
2015
I’ve done a good bit of travel by air over the course of the last 35 years, long enough to observe (and experience) an incredible degradation in air travel. To my mind, airports themselves have always been bad. I long ago decided that once I entered an airport – any airport – it was best…
Scandalous Overtures — Brahms: The King of Practical Jokes
March
3rd,
2015
According to my Oxford English Dictionary, a practical joke is “a trick played on someone in order to make them look foolish and amuse others.” As definitions go that one is DEAD ON. Unlike a verbal joke, which features a storyteller and a presumably amused listener, a practical joke requires a victim: a patsy, a…
Louis Moreau Gottschalk: The Justin Bieber Of 1860s San Francisco
February
24th,
2015
“Fame” and “fortune” remain two of the great bugaboos for those morality police who, possessing neither, would make our lives miserable for wanting either. I personally see no harm in fortune. Yes, I am aware that “money can’t buy you love” but it can buy just about everything else, most especially time: time to do…
Richard Wagner: What Ever Happened To Wagner’s Manuscripts?
February
17th,
2015
The scope of Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity will forever boggle the mind. Incredibly, almost seventy years after the end of World War II, art and treasure pillaged by Nazi Germany continues to be found even as treasure hunters search for billions of dollars worth of missing gold, platinum, and diamonds. The stories of these…
Scandalous Overtures — Hector Berlioz: Dressed To Kill
February
10th,
2015
So here’s what happened. In 1830, the 26-year-old composer Hector Berlioz fell in love with an adorable 18-year-old pianist named Camille Molke. Within a couple of weeks they were under the covers (ahem!); within a month they were unofficially engaged. Camille’s mom, however, had other ideas. She proceeded to put Berlioz through more hoops than…
Scandalous Overtures — Rachmaninoff: Reborn Through Hypnosis
February
3rd,
2015
The human hand, with its four fingers and opposable thumb, is a miracle of design, function, dexterity, and beauty. The human hand contains 29 major and minor bones (though many people have a few more) and 29 major joints. Each human hand has at least 123 named ligaments and 34 muscles that move the fingers…
Scandalous Overtures — Johannes Brahms & Clara Schumann: Did They Or Didn’t They?
January
30th,
2015
There is a cadre of power-elite, formerly-married women in the entertainment biz today who have a reputation for dating significantly younger men, among them Jennifer Lopez, Susan Sarandon, Sharon Stone, Madonna, Demi Moore, and Cher. And who can blame them? My only problem with this is that none of them ever dated me when I…
Audible.com Sponsor Since 2015
January
29th,
2015
I’ve often wondered what our clothing would look like if, like racecar drivers, we all wore emblems of sponsorship. Some of us would have more such patches than others, although I would hope that we’d all have a patch acknowledging our parents (“Mom. Dad. Since 1954.”); a favorite teacher or coach (“Teached me wat I…