More on: music

In 1987, three years after Harper’s heralded her as the “Queen of Christian Rock,” Leslie Phillips sang these words: “You lock me up / with your expectations / Loosen the pressure you’ve choked me with / I can’t breathe.” That song appeared on an album called The Turning, and the title spoke of her decision…

Brother, at your grave, we stood gathered under Thanksgiving trees bare with wind. When the words had been said, I expected silence to resume. But your pale fiancée placed an incongruous stereo on your new earth, pressed the red button and the brief world opened to song. I stood amazed as music broke forward. Stunned,…

Portraits of the Sonata: Desire and Transformation in Modern European Cinema   IN 1984, A MIDDLE-AGED MAN wearing headphones, sequestered away in the attic of an East German apartment building, sits before a typewriter. Around him are the trappings of his profession, the machines and gear that allow him to spy upon events transpiring in…

Nearing eighty, Fauré has found the end of sound. He never would have guessed it had so much to do with the Mediterranean light of childhood, or lake breezes swirling all summer at Savoy, and so little to do with music growing quieter everywhere but in his mind. He is relieved to hear the garbled…

Upon Listening to Biber’s Rosary Sonatas Scordatura: Abnormal tuning of a stringed instrument in order to obtain unusual chords, facilitate difficult passages, or change the tone color. —Harvard Dictionary of Music, second edition ALTHOUGH I AM a piano tuner who used to play a violin, I would not dream of referring to the violin as…

Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations The following essay is excerpted from a new book of the same title from Gaspereau Press (www.Gaspereau.com).   TODAY I believe in God. A visiting friend and I were listening to a jazz trio one Sunday morning in an Anglican church. The trio led off with a…

The following lecture was originally delivered in London in October 2008, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Sandford St. Martin Trust, which promotes excellence in religious media programming in the U.K. It was later broadcast on BBC Radio. HISTORY HAS an annoying habit of sneaking up and mugging the certain and the convinced. In European…

A Private Letter A Poet on Writing for Composers NOT LONG AGO, I was giving a reading with another poet who has written libretti for composers. I hadn’t heard anything of his musical collaborations for a few years, and asked him if he was still working in the opera world. “I’m doing something for television,”…

The Joseph lilies sway, in choir, a silent chorus of white-coifed nuns; you stand, distant from them, child of God, suffering God. On sodden fields a flock of chittering starlings shifts; the eye is never worn with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Leaves of the eucalyptus multiply and your solicitous murmurings sound like…

SHE HAD A CHOICE: she could have flown to Boston to make a proper farewell. Gene was sure of it. “He’s in a very loving state these days, Melanie. Very weak, very thin, very loving. You’d hardly recognize him. I know it would mean a lot if you came.” But she couldn’t. They were fifteen…