Music

He taught me how to see. Quite literally. Once our dear friend Hans Rookmaaker was visiting us in Connecticut, and as we drove around in our car he would tell us to pause in front of a certain building. "This one is the real thing," he would declare. What he meant was that the particular home...

At the risk of being labeled a musical snob, I venture a comment or two on one of the twentieth century's greatest composers, the centenary of whose birth we celebrate this year--Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975). He is to music what Alexander Solzhenitsyn is to Soviet literature. Finding early...

I start with a shameful confession. I belong to a family which regularly watches the frightful drivel called American Idol . All I can plead in mitigation is that my children are avid followers of the program; and both sons compensate for this failing by having otherwise impeccable music taste,...