Author: Brian

I do design work for an orchestra that uses a well-heeled, highly respected ticketing and donor CRM. I design a template page into which this third-party’s proprietary code is injected on their servers. One of their scripts was causing problems with the template … but that’s not my question. I happened to notice a strangely… Continue reading What is this?

Some of my high school classmates are getting together for an impromptu hang soon. I declined, because I have family coming into town and they’ll be here through Saturday. It’s true! It’s also true that they’re staying in another house on the other side of town and I could absolutely go to this reunion if… Continue reading Class impAct

There is a hill on my regular neighborhood circuit that is about a half-mile long with an average grade of between 4% and 5%—closer to 5 if you ask me. In my current meh state of fitness, I’m less concerned with the speed at which I go up that hill than I am about my… Continue reading Trombone and the Art of Cycling

After the 2022 Grammy winners were announced in early April, I finally took the time to listen to the Foo Fighters’ Medicine at Midnight, which is definitely a recording worthy of its award for Best Rock Album and also definitely worth your time and ears. But it dawned on me that, even after 25 years,… Continue reading Form and Analysis > Foo Fighters: Everlong

I saw this posted elsewhere this morning. A couple of hours spent trimming and raking in the yard gave me time to digest it. I’ve never had a tenure-track position. I haven’t yet taken the time to get a terminal degree—maybe one day, but I didn’t want one a quarter-century ago and I haven’t wanted… Continue reading Abject Adjuncthood

How pattern shapes our perception of rhythm and meter This past Sunday morning I came across a fascinating interactive article by Elisa Gabbert on The New York Times app that studied both a poem by W.H. Auden and the 16th-century painting by Pieter Breughel the Elder that inspired Auden’s work. The painting, called “Landscape with… Continue reading Alternative rhythm

My favorite contemporary composer turns 75 today, which means that when I started listening to his music, he was younger than I am now. Yikes. I became aware of the music of John Adams in the summer before my junior year of high school. I was on a twelve-hour road trip to Eastman with Randy… Continue reading Happy Birthday, John Adams!

Over the summer, I read a New York Times Magazine article which recounted how Greek police, proudly displaying recovered works of art following a museum heist, dropped a Picasso and then just picked it up and replaced it like it was a bag of flour that fell off the kitchen counter. In the accompanying video,… Continue reading Are we too gentle (or worse, genteel) with music?

The Sunday NYT Arts & Leisure section this morning featured a multipage compilation of their “5 Minutes” recommendations for listening to classical music. Five minutes is great and I hope it helps some readers make new discoveries. But five minutes of listening can be like looking at just the top left corner of a Monet… Continue reading Long-form Listening