Tag: Music to My Ears

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Laurie Anderson
Big Science
Warner Brothers, 1982

In the Seventies, Laurie Anderson made a modest name for herself in the “performance art” scene. (more…)

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Simple Minds
New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84)
Virgin UK/A&M USA, 1982

New Gold Dream is arguably Simple Minds’ greatest album, the other leading candidate being 1985’s Once Upon a Time. (more…)

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See part 1 here

Dreamin’ My Dreams (1976; re-released in 1978 as Faithless) ***

Imagine Lotte Lenya singing Patsy Cline’s greatest hits and you’ll get a sense of Marianne Faithfull’s first comeback, Dreamin’ My Dreams. Faithfull’s voice had changed strikingly from her Sixties albums. (more…)

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When Marianne Faithfull died on January 30, 2025, it hit me that I had been a fan of her music for most of my life. Such milestones are occasions for what I like to call the Full Life Audit. We have grown up immersed in propaganda and decadence, and even though we might consciously reject them, they are still inside us and come to the surface in surprising ways. (more…)

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This is the first installment of a new series, Music to My Ears. I will review albums and talk about music and musicians. I will say a lot about my own history with music and my listening experiences. There will also be a strong element of nostalgia. (more…)

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Is Billie Eilish’s new Bond song, “No Time to Die,” the worst Bond song ever? Close. But sadly, there is a lot of competition for that title. Here is my ranking, from best to worst.

Note: Not every Bond theme is a Bond song. Doctor No and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service have instrumental themes. Beyond that, many Bond movies contain non-theme songs that are, nevertheless, strongly associated with the films. I will discuss two of them here.  (more…)

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On Friday, March 11, I saw the Deutsche Oper in Berlin’s production of Rienzi, Richard Wagner’s third opera. Rienzi is a Grand Opera in the Parisian style, an approach Wagner eventually rejected. Although Wagner excluded Rienzi and his first two operas from the canon of the Bayreuth Festival, Rienzi remained his most popular opera throughout his lifetime. Wagner came to find Rienzi “quite repugnant,” but Gustav Mahler characterized it as nothing less than “the greatest musical drama ever composed.” (more…)

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English original here

Je suis un grand admirateur du compositeur finnois Jean Sibelius, qui avec Richard Strauss et Ralph Vaughan Williams, fit partie de la dernière génération (jusqu’ici) des grands compositeurs romantiques européens. Ainsi mon attention fut attirée par un article du 29 novembre 2009 sur Sibelius dans la Chronicle of Higher Education, « A Composer’s Ties to Nazi Germany Come Under New Scrutiny » (more…)

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“What can you buy, that lifts a heavy heart up to the sky?” This question, the opening words of New Order’s Music Complete, is meant to be rhetorical. But there’s a straightforward and rather obvious answer: you can buy Music Complete itself, one of New Order’s most joyous and compelling creations.

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Richard Wagner
Great Recordings
SONY/RCA/Eurodisc
40 CDs

Currently priced at $15.79 at Amazon.com, this is 40 CDs of Wagner for the price of one.  (more…)

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In addition to being the fourth anniversary of Counter-Currents going online, June 11, 2014 was the 150th birthday of Richard Strauss, the German Romantic composer and conductor. Strauss belonged to the last generation of the Romantic era, along with such composers as Edward Elgar (1857–1934), Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), and Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943).  (more…)

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Recently my new nomadic, couch-surfing existence took me to New York City, where I saw Death in June on Saturday, May 31 at Webster Hall in the Village. (In case you were there, I was the white guy dressed in black.) (more…)

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Benjamin Britten, the English composer, conductor, and pianist and the founder of the Aldeburgh Festival, was born 100 years ago today in the Suffolk fishing port of Lowestoft.

Britten’s father was a dentist, who provided his four children with a middle-class upbringing and education. His mother came from a musical family. (more…)