He was trained as, believe it or not, an aeronautical engineer, and he wrote books on aviation and space exploration as well as biographies of musicians. But he’s remembered for his encyclopedias on rock/pop/soul, musical theater and the “American songbook,” country-and-western, and (with his son) folk and blues – the first comprehensive scholarly reference books these genres had.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Why Thornton Wilder’s ‘The Skin Of Our Teeth’ Is Suddenly Relevant Again
Seems like we hadn’t seen much of Wilder’s second-most famous play in recent years; Wilder himself once wrote that “it mostly comes alive under conditions of crisis.” Laura Collins-Hughes talks to three prominent directors – Carey Perloff, Bartlett Sher, and Arin Arbus – and playwright Paula Vogel about both the script’s problems and why this might be a good time to produce it again.
The Original Svengali Was A Conductor, And Other Goodies From The Novel That Gave Us The Word
That novel was Trilby (you may recognize that name as well), which was written as a serial for Harper’s Monthly by George du Maurier (Daphne’s grandfather) in 1894. The title character was a tone-deaf working-class girl whom the conductor-pianist Svengali hypnotized and turned into a world-famous opera singer. As Emma Garman recounts, both of those characters got as far beyond their creator as the monster did with Victor Frankenstein.
The Pioneering Minimalist Composer We’ve Forgotten About
“The canon of musical minimalism tends to be set in stone, carved like Mount Rushmore: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young. It’s solid, immovable, but the lineup has long lacked for figures who are under-acknowledged or under-appreciated – most notably Tony Conrad.” Jennifer Lucy Allan fills us in.
The Very Messy Story Of The ‘Apocalypse Now’ Video Game
Three weeks ago, a Kickstarter campaign started for crowdfunding a game version of the Francis Ford Coppola Vietnam epic, blessed by Coppola himself. But the project started about eight years ago at a video game studio called Killspace, which one former employee told reporter Adi Robertson was “the worst-run company you could possibly imagine.”
How The Martha Graham Dance Company Revives A Work She Created Decades Before The Current Dancers Were Born
Marina Harss talks with company artistic director Janet Eilber and rehearsal director Denise Vale about recreating the stark 1931 piece Primitive Mysteries – and with PeiJu Chien-Pott, who’s dancing Graham’s own role and says it’s the hardest one she’s ever done.
Preserving Palmyra On The Web, With Centuries-Old Images
With ISIS having retaken the ancient Roman city in Syria and destroyed yet more of its historical sites, the Getty has created an online archive with the oldest-known photos of Palmyra (from 1864) and drawings and etchings made in the mid- and late 1700s.
‘White Guy For Rent’ – Playing Random Foreigners To Help Chinese Developers Sell Condos
During the big real estate bubble a few years ago that led to China’s now-notorious “ghost cities,” expats like David Borenstein found work as what Chinese called a “laowai-for-rent” – appearing at real estate sales events pretending to be a foreign businessman or musician or athlete in order to make the development look international and important. Borenstein tells Linda Poon what it was like.
Did ‘Goodnight Moon’ Have A Sequel? Yes, Sort Of
In 1950, Margaret Wise Brown wrote, and put away, two fragments that Sarah Lyall describes as “part variation on, part expansion of” her 1944 children’s book , which later became a worldwide bestseller. Lyall tells how those two fragments were found and combined by an editor and will be published this year.
Google Has Created A Bot To Play Duets With You
“Google’s latest artificial intelligence experiment is a music-playing piano bot that digests whatever keyboard melodies you give it and tries to respond in kind.” But does it succeed in responding in kind? Nick Statt tries it out. (includes video)