Music Archives - Page 4 of 7

Blue Monday

Of Summits, Blowhards, and Hard Blowing

Thoughts on Trump, treason, and defending democracy

July 23, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington In the wake of Donald Trump’s recent Helsinki “summit” with Vladimir Putin, which followed quickly on the heels of Trump’s disastrous meeting with EU leaders in Brussels, talk of “treason” is in the air. To ...

Blue Monday

Confirmation

Timing is everything in politics – and the fight against Trump’s SCOTUS nominee is political

July 16, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington In the coming weeks and perhaps months much political contention in the U.S. will center on the Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme ...

Blue Monday

Both Directions Together

Improvising the greatness we need in these dark times

July 9, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington I’ve been writing the “Blue Monday” column for around six months now. Each week is a new situation, a new political experience to endure and a new writing challenge to surmount. In recent weeks I ...

Feature

Music by the Numbers

An interview with Eli Maor

July 7, 2018 • by Princeton University Press

That music and mathematics are somehow related has been known for centuries. Pythagoras, around the 5th century BCE, may have been the first to discover a quantitative relation between the two: experimenting with taut strings, he found out that shortening the effective length of a string to one half its ...

Blue Monday

God Bless the Child?

Reflections on Families Belong Together, Trumpism, and the politics of resistance

July 2, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington While recent primaries have furnished some reason for modest hopefulness (see for example my piece last week on the primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), in a broader sense recent political developments have further darkened the already dark ...

Blue Monday

Memory, Forgetting, and the Bluest Kind of Blue

Bucharest Reflections on the 20th Century

June 4, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington Memory, Forgetting, and the Bluest Kind of Blue: Bucharest Reflections on the 20th Century I am writing this while drinking my second cup of strong cappuccino on the veranda of Bon Pain, a wonderful small French patisserie in ...

Blue Monday

Prague in Spring

A riff on jazz, dissent and democracy in dark times

May 28, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington I started writing this in Prague, on May 20, which is my birthday, while sitting across the street from Villa Lana, the home of the Czech Academy of Sciences, which for the past twenty-five years ...

Feature

GIDEST: The Tar Sands Songbook

The work of Tanya Kalmanovitch

May 17, 2018 • by GIDEST

In her documentary play The Tar Sands Songbook, musician, ethnomusicologist, Associate Professor at The New School’s College of Performing Arts, and 2017-18 GIDEST fellow Tanya Kalmanovitch uses strategies from the creative and performing arts, ethnography, and design to invite participants into an imaginative, critical process of unnerving the intimate relationship of oil ...

Feature

The Only One

Charley Pride, Darius Rucker, and the Colorblind Narrative in American Country Music

May 12, 2018 • by Matthew Linton

In 1987, country music novelty singer O.B. McClinton released “The Only One” which explored the complexity of being a black country music artist. The song told the story of McClinton traveling to a country bar to sing, only to be questioned for being a black artist in a genre dominated ...

Blue Monday

Primary Contests

Further thoughts on consonance and dissonance

May 7, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington In the coming week, millions of Americans will go to the polls on May 8 to determine which candidates will run in the upcoming November general election. The November election is particularly important given the ...

Blue Monday

Consonance, Dissonance, Harmony

Itinerary of some thoughts on thinking politically

April 30, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington This is my fourteenth “Blue Monday” column. In but a few weeks, I have already written over forty thousand words in this virtual space. It’s not as if I don’t have a life. The column is not ...

Blue Monday

Damascus Blues

On the bombing of Syria

April 16, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

"I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and I wrote some blues." -Duke Ellington As promised by our Bloviator-in-Chief, we bombed Syria last Friday, inauspiciously the 13th of April. It was not the first time the United States has bombed Syria. The US has been conducting a low-intensity air war against ISIS, in ...