music

Did Ravel Stand on Beethoven’s Shoulders?

At an exhilarating four-hand piano house concert in Tucson, two noted recording and performing artists, Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt, played a signature piece by Maurice Ravel (1875 – 1937), La Valse: Poème Chorégraphique composed in 1919-1920. Later, in a discussion with the audience, the pianists noted that they followed the faster tempo set by […]

Read More

Music Education in the Age of COVID-19

Quite a bit has been written about the relative merits of online education versus in-person instruction. Before this year, most online courses around the country were taken voluntarily, but when the COVID-19 shutdown occurred in mid-March, thousands of instructors found themselves forced to hurriedly convert their classes to an online format, for better or worse. […]

Read More

Rap in the White House, Rap in the Schools

It’s rare that poetry explications are done on Fox News, but guests weighed in on the depth of meaning in a line like “burn a [George W.] Bush for peace” and a panegyric to convicted cop-killer and Black Panther Assata Shakur with “May God bless your soul.”  The “poet” in question was the rapper Common, invited to the […]

Read More

Pomona’s Banned Anthem?

A reader, Carl Olson (Pomona ’66) writes us about a flap over the ban of Pomona’s alma mater song: What kind of college has an alma mater song, but then refuses to allow it at Commencement or Convocation? It’s Pomona College in Claremont, California. President David Oxtoby has made such an inexplicable ruling. Apparently he […]

Read More