Healing at the Speed of Sound

Healing at the Speed of Sound

By Don Campbell and Alex Doman

Hudson Street Press, New York City, 2011.

288 pages, $25.95

This is the latest in a recent spate of books treating of the psychological, indeed the neurological and embryological, origins of our appreciation for and our human ability to create music.

Such books have been very popular ever since Don Campbell came out with The Mozart Effect in 1997. That book argued for the beneficial … Continue Reading

Source: Pexels

If you’re unfamiliar with metronomes, it doesn’t mean you’re totally offbeat. This device is largely used in the music world, so it makes sense that some people might not know what it is right off the bat. In short, metronomes are almost as old as modern music itself, making them an integral part in making music for hundreds of years. Whether you make music yourself or just listen to it, chances are you’ve encountered a metronome or … Continue Reading

Louis Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971)

The great jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) is the subject of a one-man play now touring, Satchmo at the Waldorf, starring John Douglas Thompson.

The play contains three distinct roles, and Thompson by turn inhabits each of them: Louis Armstrong himself of course; Miles Davis, a younger rival who is outspoken about civil rights and thinks Armstrong is a sell-out; and Joe Glaser, Armstrong’s agent/manager. Glaser, though performed by Thompson without transformative make-up, is a … Continue Reading

Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” is considered by many guitar and rock music aficionados to be the greatest guitar solos of all time.

One must consider that so many people have selected Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” to display their guitar skills, that it has unfortunately been banned from being played at most Guitar Centers when trying out an instrument. Seriously, there have been signs posted that anyone who dares to play one of the greatest guitar solos of all time will be asked to put down their guitar and leave immediately. Tough crowd.

However, … Continue Reading

Railroad-Themed Tunes

From the days of the steam engine, through diesel and electric models, the railroads have proven a potent source of inspiration for the composers of songs and for their lyricists. In recognition of the recent release of the movie Atlas Shrugged I, a movie that has both a railroad corporation and a missing composer as key plot points, we at justsheetmusic would like to present ten of our favorite of the songs that resulted from the romance of the rails. … Continue Reading

Stearns Square Hosts Journey Tribute Band: Who Was Journey?

A Journey tribute band, The Great Escape, played recently at Stearns Square, an outdoors summer venue in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts.

I’m afraid I don’t have any video of that performance to share with you. I do have video of another recent performance of the same tribute band though. Here they are doing Faithfully. That performance is, I might as well say, true to its source. The performers do their job … faithfully.

Their fidelity has me thinking about … Continue Reading

Tower of Babel

Imagine watching a pre-dawn scene. This is a building site. The master workman awakens his workers to continue their efforts on a tower. Only gradually, as you watch this ‘geistliche oper,’ this ‘sacred opera,’ do you realize which tower this is. For this is the tower of Babel – and in due course Nimrod himself will come on stage to boast that this tower shall reach Heaven and he shall speak face to face with God.

The opera is … Continue Reading

Johann Sebastian Bach (21 March 1685 - 28 July 1750)

Born in Eisenach, Saxe-Eisenach, Germany in 1685, Johann Sebastian Bach was the youngest of eight children. He came from a family of musicians in which all of his uncles played professionally and his father was a director of the town’s musicians. Although he learned the violin and harpsichord from his father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, it was his uncle Johann Christoph Bach who taught him to play the organ, the instrument for which … Continue Reading

Five big 2011 music-news stories

We at www.justsheetmusic.com would like to bid a fond farewell to the year 2011, as we look with hope to the New Year.

Every year is a mixture of good and bad, of victory and despair, in music as in every other human endeavor. Here are five stories that especially caught our attention. Since they’re listed in no particular order, chronological or otherwise, this will be a “bullet point” list rather than an enumeration…. Continue Reading

Tyrants as Music Critics

Dmitri Shostakovich is one of a considerable group of ‘Soviet’ composers: those who continued and expanded upon the Russian musical tradition through the Soviet period, often at grave personal risk from the authorities, because said authorities were trying to force all art into their preferred propagandistic mode, ‘Socialist Realism.’ Shostakovich is often and deservedly mentioned in this connection in the same breath with Prokofiev and Khachaturian.

In 1934, Shostakovich premiered an opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk … Continue Reading