I recently spent a fair amount of time and energy researching a piano purchase, and as I had always concentrated more on the notes than on the instrument making them, it was very educational both to listen closely to a bunch of pianos and to read about differences in construction, tone, action, etc. After all […]
I wrote about volume 1 of Richard Taruskin’s history of Western music a couple of years ago. Although I finished volume 2 shortly thereafter, I never got around to writing about it, and then I stalled on the whole thing early into volume 3 until this year, when I got motivated again and ended up […]
Another one of those long difficult books that I bought on principle and then let languish on my bookshelf for a decade (literally; I just went to Amazon to see what the reader reviews were like and it informed me that I had bought this from them in 1999). Like many Gaddis books, it consists […]
So I have gotten really interested in jazz over the last year. (Apparently this is de rigueur for men as they enter middle age.) I’ve always had a vague understanding of the musical syntax, and can fake playing cocktail-piano renditions of standards okay, but I’ve never really had a good knowledge of the field as […]
This is the fourth and final volume of the Long Price Quartet fantasy series, of which I have previously reviewed the first three volumes. Basically everything I said about the other books continues to hold true; it’s totally character-driven (almost all plot developments occur because someone acted or reacted in a manner wholly consistent with […]
I’ve already posted about the first three books of Steven Erikson’s mammoth epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen [1] [2] [3], but I’ve finished the series in the meantime and if I try to write one post each about the remaining seven, I’ll never get anything else done. So I’m going to […]
“The federal [student] loans are a good deal, but they are often not enough [to] make up the difference between what a family has saved or can spend out of current income and what the student gets in grants and scholarship money.” [from the New York Times article A New Type of Student Loan, but […]
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More and more these days, analysis of chess games relies on chess engines (playing programs), whether to come up with ideas or just to double-check the human annotator’s calculations. That is not my gripe; computer analysis is just a fact of life these days. My gripe is that the people who are writing the analyses […]
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I have always been a sucker for music theory and analysis. The combination of the fairly strict rules underpinning the way in which music works with the creative freedom expressed on top of them is really appealing to me. It is probably true of any art, but music is the one I know best and […]
Book three of The Malazan Book of the Fallen does at least return to the same general location and cast of characters as the first book, but in a way, doing so makes the giant scope of the project even more clear, by launching off into entirely new plots with those characters instead of continuing […]