2008 April

As a musician, Derek Snyder wears at least three hats: performer, teacher, and arranger. The Cleveland-based cellist will be wearing all of them when he hosts the second annual “Cello Celli!” concert at Kerrytown...

Who remembers the last time a piano player tried performing all thirty-two of Beethoven's piano sonatas in Ann Arbor? Yes, that's right. Ursula Oppens tried it back in 1997. The idea was that she'd juxtapose...

The music turns heads and makes necks crane on Main Street. Is this Crazy Wisdom Bookstore? Isn’t their usual fare singer-songwriters softly strumming acoustic guitars? What’s this rockin’ from upstairs? This...

In her recent book Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil, C. D. Wright quotes pianist Glenn Gould: "The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline, but a gradual lifelong construction of a...

They've turned one of the fields next to Matthaei Botanical Gardens into a parking lot, and hundreds of cars are there. I've never seen this many at Matthaei before. Earth Day must be quite popular in Ann Arbor. I park...

Quite a few young bands have gone back to draw on the folk-rock of the 1960s, having realized, perhaps, that a good hook is harder to create than any number of more outwardly strenuous effects. There's no shortage of...

What's the ominous whirlpool in the three-by-two-foot paper Words of Warcraft map in the Graduate Library's eighth-floor Map Library? "Oh, that's just a maelstrom," says library information specialist...

For sheer bravura technique, there's not a piano player in the world who can touch Lang Lang. His fingers are fleeter, his attacks stronger, his releases crisper, his pianissimos quieter, his fortissimos louder, and his...

I'm no geneticist, but I was not surprised to hear that Natalia Zukerman, the daughter of Pinchas and Eugenia Zukerman, is a musician. Having parents who are both world-class musicians would certainly skew your odds. Can you...

Like a bracelet around the Crisler Arena floor are ten sets of concentric circles: a circular drum, a circle of men playing it in unison with sticks and singing, and a group that gathers around them to listen. Sometimes, says a...

The eleven songs on Tift Merritt's brand-new record Another Country were waiting for her in a series of rented flats in Paris. She just had to go there and get them. The liner notes tell the story: exhausted from relentless...