Karlheinz Stockhausen: the name itself is enough to terrify even the most hardened lover of contemporary music. Stockhausen — the composer who gave the world a piece for four shortwave radios, another for string quartet and four...
Read MoreNicholson Baker has carved out a unique place for himself in American letters: he is our master of the obsessive detail. All of his novels spin out from a microscopic look at a small, often mundane action. It should come as no...
Read MoreA Call Girl Named Rosemarie (Rolf Thiele, 1958) is a bitter commentary on the evils of capitalism attendant on West Germany's Wirtschaftswunder ("economic miracle") that followed World War II. Thiele portrays the...
Read MoreIn one of those curious period fads that crop up regularly, early-twentieth-century Viennese culture is all the rage in early-twenty-first-century America. New York's Neue Galerie — a gem of a museum devoted to...
Read MoreSo far as I could tell, the woman sitting next to me at the Ann Arbor Symphony’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth trembled, smiled, cried, and finally simply levitated out of her seat. I couldn’t really stare...
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New U-M president (and former Iowan) Mary Sue Coleman should feel right at home when the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane dancers grace the Power Center stage Saturday and Sunday, January 11 and 12. Last seen here in 1998, Jones and...
Read MoreAnn Arbor isn't plastered with big, blaring government posters showing leering caricatures of Saddam Hussein, works analogous to the World War II propaganda and patriotic art on display at EMU's Ford Gallery. Unlike the...
Read MoreAlthough she has written a couple of novels, Lorrie Moore is best known as a writer of short stories populated with the middle-aged and the middle-class, with lawyers and businessmen and college professors — along with the...
Read More"You can go your own way, but you can't be gone too long." That lyric from the first track on Smokestack's 2001 CD It's Coming Down is a fitting description of this jam band's approach. Serving up...
Read MoreTimmy P (Parkkila) is serious about comedy. The Chelsea-grown WMU grad with a background in radio, real estate, and "lots and lots of restaurant work" started promoting comedy two years with hopes of creating a...
Read MoreWell-educated jazz pianists tend to play like well-educated pianists — all chops and no gravy. Canadian-born Brooklynite D. D. Jackson proves that this does not have to be the case. His classical and jazz training, which...
Read MoreThe last annual concert mounted by the Huron Valley Chapter of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America and its performing arm, the all-male Huron Valley Harmonizers, lived up...
Read MoreThe audience for the University Choral Union's annual performances of Handel's Messiah seems to consist solely of those folks for whom attending is a traditional part of their families' seasonal celebrations....
Read MoreAccording to his new album, A Little Pain Never Hurt, local singer-songwriter Dick Siegel wants to be remembered as a "real Renaissance man." He also wants "to be six thick strips of Canadian bacon." How...
Read MoreIn 1938 Thornton Wilder's famous play about dead people, Our Town, hit the stage. It quickly became one of America's best-loved classics, so accessible that it has been fondly performed by high school after high school...
Read MoreAmong the jazz pianists who came to prominence during the 1960s, perhaps none has had the staying power of Herbie Hancock. His early stint with Miles Davis allowed the young pianist to develop his unique style and exposed him to...
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