Deceptively Simple

Add The Listening Sessions to your list of anonymous Chicago music blogs, which already includes Tonic Blotter and…um, yeah, the list kind of ends there, so far as I know. In the course of writing about the Saturday Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert, Mr. or Mrs. Listening Sessions (who goes by the nom de bloge The [...]

“You cannot put lipstick on this pig.”-Christine Fair, South Asia expert for the RAND Corporation, on the likelihood that the Islamist terrorists responsible for the Mumbai bombings were homegrown, and not part of an international jihadist movement, in the New York Times.
Given the tenets of sharia, this could also be the Inapt Female Beautification Metaphor of [...]

UK-music critic Jessica Duchen takes issue with the classical MSM (becoming less MS by the day) naming the world’s greatest orchestras. In that Internet-ty, bottom-up, way, she proposes an election to determine the greatest living conductor. She opened it up to her readers over the weekend to determine the ten who’d be on the ballot, [...]

Chicagoans take a lot of crap for their (our, mine) inferiority complex, and feeling the need to trumpet our accomplishments and greatness to the world, which so often doesn’t seem to notice. But that sense of inferiority is absolutely bludgeoned by the crowd that insists that classical music is dying. Or that orchestral music is [...]

I sang in the choir for a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony in grad school (second bass), drove to Chicago from Bloomington to hear Pierre Boulez conduct it with the Chicago Symphony, and heard it for the first time performed by the Muncie Symphony Orchestra. And who could forget the CSO’s performance in 2006 with [...]