Even the most curmudgeonly among us has to admit Ann Arborites are insanely lucky when it comes to classical music. Not only do we have more classical music performances per capita than any other city in Michigan, but we have...
Read More“It taught me a lot about what I didn’t want to see,” says Detroit artist and former EMU art professor Charles McGee of his experience as a marine in post-bomb Nagasaki. The quote comes from a video in the...
Read MoreThe excitement starts to build from several blocks away when we see family after family with little girls in red velvet dresses, white tights, shiny black shoes, and red ribbons in their hair. The sidewalks are slippery as...
Read More“The building was stuffed to the gills,” says Kelsey Museum director Sharon Herbert.In contrast to the high-profile addition to the U-M Museum of Art across State Street, the expansion of the Kelsey, the U-M’s...
Read MoreDonald Hall, Poet Laureate of the United States in 2006-2007, and Ann Arborite Jane Kenyon, his second wife and an extraordinary poet in her own right, left Ann Arbor in 1975 to move to Hall’s ancestral home in rural New...
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On a summer evening, students of all ages fill the twelve practice rooms in the old Nalli Building just down from the Fleetwood Diner. Upstairs, Dave Sharp, of the jazz-funk band Dave Sharp’s Secret Seven, teaches a blues...
Read MoreThough they have worked together in various combinations before, when William Bolcom and Joan Morris join Gabriel Bolkosky and Michelle Cooker for “An Afternoon of American Music” at the Kerrytown Concert House on...
Read MoreSince the glory days of the old Pretzel Bell, bluegrass music has been heard only occasionally in Ann Arbor bars and clubs. But what goes around comes around again, and the Wednesday night bluegrass shows at the Circus are a...
Read MoreMany years ago, New Yorker jazz writer Whitney Balliett wrote that jazz was “the sound of surprise,” but in much of today’s mainstream this phrase has become a bit moldy, as tradition and homage have taken the...
Read MoreIf you want to start a fight among classical music fans, ask them: “Who’s the best orchestra in the world?’Nationalists will proudly point to the great American orchestras–the grand symphonies of Boston,...
Read MoreHere’s a telescope–a time-travel telescope. Set it for eleven years ago, and focus it on senior curator Carole McNamara gazing at Whistler’s painting, Sea and Rain, and wondering how the U-M Museum of Art could...
Read MoreAlthough I am an avid reader of contemporary poetry, I understand why many people, predisposed to the art because of their appreciation of the great poems of the past, have chosen to ignore its current practitioners. Unless you...
Read MoreIt’s the day before Halloween, and two sweet little puppet children are lost in a haunted forest. They make their way out, however, and enter a place marked by a huge sign that says “Ypsilanti City” over a...
Read MoreAt the beginning it’s ordinary–a video of a Santa Monica street musician, a bluesman named Robert Ridley, singing the Ben E. King evergreen “Stand By Me” with a few words of inspiring introduction. Then,...
Read MoreQ: Fifth Avenue has always been a quick way to cross town. Now there are meters taking part of it from three lanes to two lanes. Who made this decision, and can it be changed back?A: The changes to Fifth (and to Division, its...
Read MoreAt the start of the fall semester, two months before the annual Gypsy Pond Music installation goes up at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, no one knows what it will look like, sound like, or be like. Not...
Read MoreYou may have read about the impending death of classical music, but many segments of its long tradition are actually flourishing. The music of the Renaissance era was not so long ago largely the province of cloistered graduate...
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