Music & Culture
Classical Music Posts
Tacoma Method Opera tells history from a new perspective
That history tends to repeat itself, especially when people don’t learn lessons from the past, is the guiding sentiment for Teresa Pan-Hosley in her work as the president of the Chinese Reconciliation Project Foundation. This organization is solely dedicated to reconciling the dark history of the Chinese expulsion from Tacoma in 1885.
Music Moment: The Boulanger Initiative
Quick: name a classical music composer. Chances are, the first names that come up are not women.
Now there’s a new database that opens up centuries of women composers, linking their names to stories, performing scores, and recordings
Reeder’s Movie Reviews: Champions
To borrow from basketball terminology, this is a movie with slam dunk potential that commits too many turnovers. It has good intentions, but indifferent execution.
BOOK REVIEW: The Girl Who Heard The Music
When’s the last time you watched a Tiny Desk Concert? NPR’s popular in-office show became the Tiny Desk (Home) Concert when the pandemic hit. On June 24, 2021, one artist’s home studio performance came from a remote island in the south Pacific Ocean, two thousand miles west of Chile. The pianist Mahani Teave (teh-AH-veh) offered not only Handel and Chopin, but also a tour of the music school she helped to build on the island of Rapa Nui, where she grew up.
Women’s History Music Moment: Bach’s Daughters
You’ve heard so much about the sons of Johann Sebastian Bach, but there were daughters, too.
Bach was 23, and his wife Maria Barbara was 24, when the first of their children was born. They named her Catherina Dorothea. CD grew into a singer, and helped out in her father’s music work. Fifteen years passed, her mother died, her father remarried, and finally, CD Bach acquired a sister: Cristina Sophia Henrietta, daughter of Johann Sebastian and Anna Magdalena Bach. CSH died at the age of three, just as another sister, Elizabeth Juliana Frederica, was born. EJF Bach would grow up to marry one of her father’s students.
BOOK REVIEW: Chasing Chopin: A Musical Journey Across Three Centuries, Four Countries, And A Half-Dozen Revolutions
LaFarge’s Chopin journey began with an email to the creator of the video game “Frederic: The Resurrection of Music” during the 200th anniversary year of Chopin’s birth. An amateur pianist, she wanted to explore the game’s use of Chopin’s iconic “funeral march.” Of course, like all explorers, she couldn’t stop there.
