Music

Robert Kennedy’s Battle Hymn

By Benjamin Soskis
The Civil War anthem “Battle Hymn of the Republic” had long been a favorite of Robert Kennedy’s, but it did not become closely associated with the man—and the hopes many Americans had invested in him—until his death. In planning the requiem high mass held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York the Sunday after his assassination forty five years ago, on 8 June 1968, Ethel Kennedy insisted on deviating from the traditional liturgy and concluding the service with the hymn.

World music for woodwind

By Laura Jones

When you think of styles that are associated with the clarinet or saxophone you might think of classical, klezmer, or jazz, but these instruments are also well-suited to many world music styles. Ros Stephen explores this concept in the Globetrotters series, with original pieces in styles from across the globe.

The great quiet

By Trevor Herbert
The story of military music in the long nineteenth century is absent from conventional music histories even though it had a vast influence on most aspects of musical life. Bands of music originated in the British military in the eighteenth century among the aristocratic officer class as a form of entertainment and as a means of enhancing the cultural status of that profession, and they retained this function throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.

Byrd’s reasons to sing

By Kerry McCarthy

By Kerry McCarthy
The composer William Byrd published the first great English songbook (Psalms, Sonnets and Songs) in 1588. He began his book with an unusual and charming list: “Reasons briefly set down by the author to persuade everyone to learn to sing.” Byrd’s “reasons to sing” give us a glimpse into everyday musical life in the time of Shakespeare.

Concerning the cello

By Simon Riker
How many times have I heard someone say, “Oh, I just love the cello! What a beautiful instrument!”? Certainly too many to count or remember, since I began playing the instrument at the age of nine. Of course, it’s little wonder that the cello resonates so strongly with people, since its range and timbre so neatly overlap with the human voice, as many cellists will be quick to point out.

The end of ownership

By Alex Sayf Cummings
Is there such a thing as a “used” MP3?
That was the question before the United States District Court for Southern New York earlier this Spring, when Capitol Records sued the tech firm ReDigi for providing consumers with an online marketplace to “sell” their unwanted audio files to other music fans.

Music to surf by

By Carey Fleiner

The 20^th of June is International Surfing Day. I’m not sure if I have the proper street cred to write about surfing. For one thing, even though I grew up on the Mid-Atlantic coast, I can’t swim. My nephew, however, was part of a hardcore crowd who surfed regularly on the beaches near Ocean City, Maryland, and the Indian River Inlet, Delaware, in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The search for ‘folk music’ in art music

By Robert G. Rawson

Writing about the perceptions and contexts for music from the Haná region in Moravia in the most recent volume of Early Music got me thinking more broadly about the subject of ‘folk music’ or rustic music of various types, and the emphasis and value frequently placed upon it in the context of art music.

20 of the most iconic songs in industrial music

By S. Alexander Reed

Curated from the pages of Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, this playlist spans over 30 years, offering a chronological tour of industrial music. From its politically charged beginnings in noisy performance art and process-based tape meddling, it moved into 1980s flirtations with rock to its more recent aggressive, synth-driven goth-tinged dance stylings.

An outdoor overture

By Anna-Lise Santella
On 12 June, summer officially begins in Chicago when the Grant Park Music Festival, “the nation’s only free, outdoor classical music series of its kind,” opens its 79th season at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park. I’m a huge fan of summer music festivals in general — what’s not to like about spending a beautiful night in a beautiful place listening to music I love performed by some of the best musicians in the world? — but of Grant Park in particular.

The power of popular songs

By Saartje Vanden Borre and Elien Declercq
1883. In Tourcoing, a French industrial town right on the border with Belgium, the local celebrity and writer of Flemish origin Jules Watteeuw published Le marchand d’oches for the first time. His song about a Flemish rag-and-bone man who had migrated to Northern France to make a living but kept dreaming about his hometown as the Garden of Eden, was a huge success.

Kinky Boots

By Liz Wollman
Young Charlie Price (Stark Sands) of Northampton, England, has just unwillingly inherited his family’s struggling shoe factory. His girlfriend wants him to sell it to a condominium developer and move to London, where they can live a properly upwardly mobile life. Torn between his family obligations and his desire to do something other than run a shoe factory, Charlie meets a drag queen named Lola (born Simon; played by Billy Porter), who happens to break a heel and mention that he would do anything for a better-made pair of fabulous boots to wear during drag performances.

Five reasons to watch the Tony Awards on Sunday

By Liz Wollman
The Tony Awards is consistently the lowest-rated broadcast of all televised entertainment awards shows, which helps explain why it is also the most awesome. I’m not being snide, here—either about the teeny spectatorship or about the awesomeness. As to the former point, here’s some perspective: The 2012 Academy Awards ceremony was watched by 39.3 million people, while the 2012 Tony Awards ceremony was watched by six million people.

Coronation Music

By Miriam Higgins

Sunday 2 June marks the 60th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey in London. It also therefore follows that it is the anniversary of the works which were first performed at the coronation, including William Walton’s Orb and Sceptre March and Coronation Te Deum, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s O taste and see and Old Hundredth Psalm Tune (All people that on earth do dwell).

Europa borealis: Reflections on the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest Malmö

By Philip V. Bohlman and Dafni Tragaki
In the spirit of the Eurovision Song Contest motto for 2013 “We Are One,” we seek the common space afforded by dialogic reflections on the European unity that has inspired and eluded the Eurovision since 1956. We search to rescue stretto from the fragments of the largest and most spectacular popular-music competition in the world.

The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky, and Balanchine

100 years ago, the world was shocked by, of all things, a ballet. Le Sacre du printemps (Rite of Spring), choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky and composed by Igor Stravinsky, caused a riot when it was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 29 May 1913. Stravinsky’s composition was revolutionary; it introduced dissonance in classical music.