Zweikampf
While harpsichords are mainly associated with classical music, their distinctive sound crops up in...
Read More
Event Reviews
Dave Douglas
Historians may quibble, but to me the history of the jazz trumpet began in 1924, when the young...
Read More
Terrance Hayes
When I teach contemporary poetry to the young, I tell them to pay attention to everything about...
Read More
A Dangerous Experiment
It was not till 1870, more than fifty years after the U-M’s founding in 1817, that it first...
Read More
That 1 Guy
That 1 Guy–Mike Silverman of Las Vegas–is a one-man band. He plays the Magic Pipe, a...
Read MoreMeredith Monk
With her latest performance work, Meredith Monk says she sought to create “space for imagination and a fluid, perceptual field that could expand awareness of what we are in danger of losing.” What resulted is On...
Read MoreDom Flemons
It all started at an unheralded event called the Black Banjo Gathering, held in 2005 at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. That four-day conclave of young African American musicians explored the African and...
Read MoreCollage Concert
Hill Auditorium’s stage gets a hefty annual workout with the aptly named Collage Concert by the U-M School of Music, Theatre, & Dance. For thirty-nine years this student showcase has been riveting audiences with a...
Read MoreMary Szybist
The first small poem of Mary Szybist’s first book ended with this remarkable statement: “there are some sadnesses / in which I do not long for God.” I find it remarkable because few contemporary poets admit to...
Read MoreBatsheva Dance Company
Two women in white lean toward an unseen prize. Together they tread cautiously, captivated. Tenderly they reach for it, claim it, bathe in it. After a beat, they get a sharp slap in the face—each by her own hand. Meanwhile,...
Read MoreBolcom and Morris
Like her accompanist, husband, and artistic collaborator William Bolcom, Joan Morris specializes in old-fashioned popular music. On December 16 her extraordinary stage presence will enliven Kerrytown Concert House with an...
Read MoreThe Aesthetic Movement in America
Forty years ago, I fell in love with my philosophy of art professor. He was in love, too–this tiny old man with his long messy white hair, his lovely crooked back, his deep cackly voice–with exactly the photographers...
Read MoreAn Almost British Christmas
Though panto is short for pantomime, it has nothing to do with silent mimes wearing white makeup, berets, and striped shirts. The traditional British family entertainment is more like vaudeville meets melodrama meets commedia...
Read MoreKlezmephonic
Klezmephonic, Ann Arbor’s premier klezmer band, will play during KindleFest at Kerrytown December 2. The music that for centuries was the soundtrack of the celebrations of Eastern European Jews will resound at an American...
Read MoreAlexander Weinstein
Alexander Weinstein’s first book Children of the New World, imagines an imperfect future that is partly a logical projection of our current fascinations with new technologies and the social media they have spawned. The...
Read MoreWhite Christmas Sing-along
I walked into the main auditorium at the Michigan Theater and was dumbstruck by the sea of Santa hats. We had arrived more than a half-hour before the annual sing-along screening of White Christmas, but we were having a hard...
Read MoreThe Himalayan Bazaar’s New Year’s Eve Trek
At 7:30 we start off, about two dozen of us, wearing blinkers on our backs to help us keep track of one another and to warn traffic in the dark. It’s the Himalayan Bazaar’s annual New Year’s Eve Gourmet Dinner...
Read MoreThe King’s Singers
Baritone Christopher Gabbitas, senior member of the King’s Singers, says that they are each deeply immersed in the art of listening: “It’s a good lesson for everyone to learn, for how much better would the...
Read MoreEurope on Paper
Yes, I admit it. I went all wide-eyed and weak-kneed when the U-M Museum of Art used lures like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt in the previews for its current exhibit, Europe on Paper. I wasn’t this excited or rubbery in...
Read More