One hundred years ago in November 1909, the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland presented its 1000th free organ recital. Yes, that’s the correct number of zeroes. Starting in 1895, when the library and the music hall were built, a series of organ recitals was begun. By 1909, they had reached one thousand.
From November 6, 1895 [...]
Last time around, the Pittsburgh Symphony Book Club included a bassoon solo by the PSO’s James Rodgers and an almost hour long phone call from Vivaldi’s Virgins author Barbara Quick!
The Pittsburgh Symphony Book Club’s second session will be about the book 1791, Mozart’s Last Year by H. C. Robbins Landon. Read it and find out [...]
After seventeen straight losing seasons for our Pittsburgh Pirates, Benny Benack (1921-1986), we need you now. Decades ago, trumpeter Benny Benack’s Iron City Six used to play “Beat ‘Em, Bucs” at Pittsburgh Pirates games at Forbes Field. The raucous Dixieland song helped lead the Buccos to a world championship in 1960.
Okay, it [...]
On Tuesday, September 29, 2009, at 6:00 p.m. in the Music Department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Main Library (Oakland), we begin a program about which we are very excited, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra Book Club.
The first book to be discussed is Vivaldi’s Virgins: A Novel (paperback/large print) by Barbara Quick. This intriguing historical [...]
In a previous post, I talked about how the clanging, banging music of Einstürzende Neubauten was the perfect soundtrack to urban living. Well, since John Keats published his sonnet “To one who has long been in city pent” in 1817, it is certainly not a new sentiment to want instead to escape the urban environment [...]
One of the most heartbreaking story types in music, film, and literature is when a character is so obsessed with a lost (i.e., dead) love that he (and it is usually a male protagonist in this situation) begins to see her take form in another living being. Three of my favorites follow.
Edgar Allan Poe’s short [...]
Recently, heavy rains and a traffic-snarling, water main break in front of the library made me think of the Sisters of Mercy album Floodland. Its songs “Flood I” and “Flood II” have brooding refrains of “and the water comes rushing over, and the water comes rushing in.” (Unfortunately, that also reminded me of [...]
In The Anatomy of Melancholy, the early 17th-century English churchman and scholar, Robert Burton, wrote:
Many Men are melancholy by hearing Musick, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth.¹
Someone like me, a fan of opera, black metal, death metal, punk, folk laments, early blues, dark ambient, etc., would have to agree.
Naturally, those who are [...]
Recently, I saw some episodes of Planet Earth (including the absolutely mind-blowing “Caves”) on the Discovery Channel and I started complaining about the replacement of the original British narrator with Sigourney Weaver. Don’t get me wrong, I think Weaver is a gutsy actress and good speaker (and I relate to Rick Moranis’ nerdy neighbor character’s [...]
On the final page of the May 2009 issue of Gramophone magazine, actor David Hyde Pierce (most well known as Niles on Frasier) writes about his early piano lessons and the classical music that has touched him throughout his life. I was pleased to see him mention that some of the recordings that inspired [...]
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