Good grief is there ever a lot of crossover classical stuff going on, much of it in the United Kingdom. Let’s see . . . The Classic FM online service is teaming up with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and PlayStation to present a show titled PlayStation in Concert, billboarding “the very best in video game music.” […]
“We gonna be dealing with aliens. You think black and white gonna be a problem? Wait till you start running into motherfuckers with three or four dicks!” – George Clinton
Julius Eastman was a brilliant black/gay composer whose lamentably short life is explored on WBUR’s Here and Now. His music was beautiful, but its presentation was not for the faint of heart. I hear Bach’s C-minor Passacaglia in Eastman’s controversially titled work, “Evil Nigger.” You listen and decide for yourself. According to interviewed historian Tiona […]
I have started something called the “Hybrid Highbrow Network.” It is at this point mostly only a figment of my imagination, a matrix of people who don’t know they’re in the matrix but who mix classical, jazz, showtunes, world music and whatever into whatever comes out the other end, radio-wise. Undaunted by the fictional nature […]
The fourth installment of my Hybrid Highbrow podcast gets at a musical phenomenon that I have wanted to explore for a while: the affinity that the jazz world has for the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. In pursuit of this nexus, I’m serving up some wonderful tracks by Richie Beirach, Tabula Rasa, Oliver Haynes, the Peter […]
I enjoy one of the best driving commutes of anyone I know. I drive from San Francisco, California down the Highway One to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I teach. Usually I drive down the coast on Mondays, and back up on Thursdays. This week I downloaded King-FM’s application onto my iPhone […]
Coming out from a long Radio Survivor posting hiatus (apologies) and rummaging around for some good classical sounds, I have chanced on Sangeet – Classical Music from the Indian sub-continent, over at wonderful WPRB in Princeton, New Jersey. This morning (Saturday, November 18) the show gave its listeners a generous hit of the incomparable Ustad […]
I was listening to KPFA’s Sunday morning classical music show yesterday, and suddenly they played Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat and I thought: maybe there are two kinds of Stravinsky for two kinds of public radio stations. For the big grand classical music stations like WQXR-FM in New York City, the pre-World War I ballets with […]
My friend Sherry Gendelman played one of Maurizio Pollini’s recordings the other day on her Piano radio show on KPFA in Berkeley. It was Pollini’s version of the Chopin Preludes and reminded me of when he came to New York City in 1979 and played Carnegie Hall. This was a huge deal since he was […]
For my third Hybrid Highbrow podcast I have assembled a collection of tango pieces written by late-19th and early 20th-century classical composers. They include Albéniz, Shostakovich, Milhaud, Mompou, Stravinsky, Satie, and Poulenc. Listening to these wonderful compositions, and reading up on the history of tango, I am struck by the explosive impact that this […]
