When it comes to classical music in the twentieth century, some countries had the mojo, and some didn’t. After ruling classical music for nearly three centuries, Germany and Austria lost their mojo with the rise of Fascism...
Read MoreEarlier this year Thomas Lynch came through town to celebrate the publication of Apparition & Late Fictions, his first collection of stories. And now, at the end of the year, the ever prolific Lynch comes back to introduce...
Read MoreThe Carolina Chocolate Drops, young African American musicians from North Carolina, renew a fairly arcane tradition, the old-time black stringband music of the Carolina Piedmont that they learned from its handful of surviving...
Read MoreCurious thing about the word “playwright”—it has nothing to do with writing. “Wright” is a word from the manufacturing arts (wheelwright, shipwright), not the arty arts, and Jeff Daniels is a skilled...
Read MoreOn a Thursday summer evening in Chelsea, “Sounds and Sights” brings a crowd of strollers to the Main Street sidewalks. Couples drift through the River Gallery’s door, letting in gasps of street noise. The mood...
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For video gamers, the Video Game Archive in the Duderstadt Center on North Campus is like dying and going to heaven. Every video console and computer game is there, from the Atari 2600 to Nintendo Wii, and so are 2,200 games...
Read MoreThe Third Coast Kings bill themselves as “a proper deep funk and soul outfit,” and they have the horns to prove it. When I saw them in a swirling sea of green and red lights at the Savoy, they were missing trombonist...
Read MoreThe 230 members of the Ann Arbor Women Artists can take part in workshops, critique groups, and presentations on everything from a guest artist’s work to website design. But the group is most visible when it mounts...
Read MoreThere are two reasons to visit the current University of Michigan Museum of Art exhibit, On Beauty and the Everyday: The Prints of James McNeill Whistler. One is for its unparalleled look at the artist rightly described as...
Read More“Are we ambitious? Yes, insanely,” Chris Dempsey laughs. In 2008, Dempsey was elected president of the Academy of Early Music. He’s since been rebuilding the group that put Ann Arbor on the early music map in...
Read MoreIn Browning’s famous Victorian poem “Andrea del Sarto,” the titular speaker, an Italian Renaissance painter, justifies his way with his art by asserting that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,...
Read MoreThe jazz double bass was long thought of as a rhythm section instrument that defined the basic pulse of a tune while outlining harmony at the same time. This changed with the advent of amplification and with the arrival of a...
Read MoreSet largely in a Victorian brothel in wartime, Kathe Koja’s Under the Poppy grabs readers at the outset with a terrifying murder. But as with many scenes in a book that is as much about theater as whoring, things are not...
Read MoreThe mariachi band–perhaps half a dozen violins, a few trumpets, several guitars of different sizes and names, and often a harp or some other instrument–is a common enough representation of Mexican culture to be...
Read MoreAtlanta songwriter Shawn Mullins had a top-ten pop hit about a dozen years ago with “Lullaby,” a mostly spoken portrait of a jaded, stressed young woman in Los Angeles. Mullins’ new album, Light You Up, has a...
Read MoreAs rock ‘n’ roll becomes part of the American musical canon, its various flavors have been showing up more and more often in the programming of the Ark, Ann Arbor’s venerable redoubt of folk and acoustic music....
Read MoreYusef Komunyakaa won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Neon Vernacular, a collection of “new and selected poems” that included the work that had established his reputation as a master of several themes. Perhaps he was...
Read MoreScores of arrows come flying out of the woods, propelled by unseen men, and pierce again and again the samurai warrior’s bare chest. When I first saw Throne of Blood I was no big fan of Shakespeare, Akira Kurosawa, or...
Read MoreWith fifty-three separate productions scheduled around the world over the next year, Sweeney Todd is currently the most often performed of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals.The second most often performed isn’t West Side...
Read MoreEvery so often an art show comes along that perfectly encapsulates the contemporary moment. Politics of Fear, at the Gallery Project downtown until October 17, is just such a show. Speaking directly to an age of prolonged global...
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