Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

Boston Globe: BSO names Andris Nelsons music director, succeeding James Levine. An exciting day. I sang with Nelsons last summer at Tanglewood in a deeply felt (if a little idiosyncratic) performance of Symphony of Psalms. I also watched him conduct the BSO in a spine tingling version of Ravel’s La Valse that was easily the [...]

There’s not a lot to say about the Virginia Glee Club in the later 1950s, seemingly. The group lost one of its more influential directors, Stephen Tuttle, to Harvard in 1952, and saw two directors alternate during the remaining years. There were tours, sure; legend has it there were even panty raids on other campuses. But [...]

This has been building for a bit. I had more work to do on it, then I thought it was done. Then I heard the last two songs side by side and realized they were the perfect coda. So it’s a little longer than CD length. Oh well… The Empty Page – Sonic Youth (Murray [...]

A while ago I wrote about how Apple’s offer to upgrade previously purchased music to iTunes Plus, their “drm-lite” offering that raised recording quality and eliminated copy restrictions, had gone missing. At that point the issue appeared to be faulty infrastructure, since the link was sometimes available and since you could hit the page directly [...]

I wasn’t expecting to do another mix so soon after the last one (the business), but this one was kicking around for a while. As always, I was throwing songs I liked to listen to into a temporary playlist called “next,” but couldn’t figure out how to link them all together. Then one day I [...]

Amidst disappointing news from the University of Virginia this week, I received an unexpected pleasure in the mail today: a 1938 University song book meant for football games and boxing matches. As with the 1911 song book I posted about a few years ago, this one contains the lyrics (but no music) to commonly known songs [...]

Did you ever notice how many songs there are about the music business itself? I think the popular music industry is possibly even more self-referential than the newspaper industry (though not nearly as self-referential as the Internet…). I started hearing the connection a few years ago and began collecting examples in a playlist, and I [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve done a new mix. This one, My heart’s beating is all the proof you need (Art of the Mix), has been interesting–a little more upbeat than some of my past efforts, a few songs that have been kicking around my library for many years. I think the subtheme of [...]

It’s been four years since I last sang at Carnegie Hall, and Tuesday I’ll be there again, performing the Beethoven Missa Solemnis with the Boston Symphony, under the direction of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus’s John Oliver. It’s been an interesting run, for a host of reasons that have little to do with the music and [...]

In the process of putting together the Virginia Glee Club Wiki, containing the history of that illustrious 171-year-old assemblage, I’ve made my way through just about every official archive of Glee Club history. But there are gaps to be filled, so I’ve resorted to eBay. I’ve picked up yearbooks, magazines, and other ephemera trying to [...]

So here we are, on the eve of the last Virginia football game of 2011. At the beginning of the season, I had no hopes for a bowl game, in only the second season of the Mike London era. And yet here we are, in the Peach Bowl (now called the Chik-Fil-A Bowl) against Auburn. [...]

A while ago, I picked up an interesting historical keepsake from eBay–the program from the University of Virginia’s 1895 Public Days, aka graduation. I was hoping to find some Glee Club value here, and I got it. The program lists 1895-96 Glee Club president McLane Tilton, Jr. as completing his undergraduate degree, and also has [...]

You’ve heard “Deck Us All With Boston Charlie.” You may even have heard “Good King Sauerkraut Looked Out On His Feets Uneven.” But have you heard of “The Twelve Days of Crispness“? No? Me neither, until tonight, which kind of astonishes me. But after seven performances this season of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” with [...]

I’ve got about 5000 tracks I’ve purchased from the iTunes store over the last 8 years. That’s a lot of dough. And I’m willing to spend more–$25 a year more–to have those tracks available in the cloud. I also have about 30,000 other tracks, purchased from Amazon or eMusic, or ripped from my own library. [...]

When you’re as rusty on the blog as I am, you don’t say no to a meme when it drops into your lap. Thanks to Eileen Huang, fellow TFCer and collaborative pianist, for the tag. First instrument: piano. Thanks, Mom, for the instruction. Age at first music lesson: Five, I think. First piece performed in [...]