Timeless noise
Every time I get off the Tube at Oxford Circus – which, given the host of fun things I’m up to at the Wigmore Hall and BBC Radio 3 of late, is fairly often – I have to go past the Nike flagship store, right on the junction where the
Tag Archives: classical music
Put your back into it
I’ve been having tremendous fun this term teaching a course on the history of music criticism at City Lit. We’ve only had four sessions so far, but we’ve already covered some pretty major points for discussion including what should/shouldn’t fall within a reviewer’s domain; whether ad hominem arguments are allowed
Sense and Sensibleness
Maybe it’s because I’ve had two lovely trips to Bath this week (once to judge for the Mid-Somerset Festival, once to take part in Bath MozartFest), but Jane Austen has rather been on my mind. Not so much the feisty heroines like Lizzie Bennett, or the well-meaning interferers like Emma
Making a classic
In the last few weeks, Classic FM has made several big announcements. Celebrating its 25th birthday this year, it reported in early August that listening figures for the station were at around 5.8 million, with a substantial percentage of these being under-35s; and also produced a list of the biggest-selling
Why we shouldn’t trust Those People
How dearly we love to categorise. Whether it’s heading to an event you found under the “Classical music” section of an events guide, steering offspring away from the “Supernatural Fiction” young adult section in the book shop, or shouting at the checkout staff because the eggs weren’t in the “Baking”
An inconvenient truth – for whom?
For lovers of musical blogs around the internet, the title of this week’s post will probably be ringing a bell already. It is taken from a series of articles on the site On An Overgrown Path written by Bob Shingleton, who has recently been part of an exchange with Joyce
Performance and polemics, or: whose history is it anyway?
Oh dear. As you can probably already guess from the title, this is going to get messy. Richard Taruskin’s Text and Act will be invoked. I’m going to get tetchy with oversimplified journalism. And there might be a bit of Brahms in here as well. Yeah, I’d be hiding too.
Listen to this (?/!)
This last week, I’ve mostly been plotting. This is for two reasons: the first is that being a freelancer actually requires quite a lot of plotting, I now realise, in order to get your ducks in a row before you start trying to find the time to realise your next
