I was recently shocked to realize that the highest-rated television show in the Persian Gulf was a Saudi Arabia program called Millions Poet. The show is similarly formatted to American Idol where each week amateur poets write and read works for texters to vote on. It really didn’t take me long flipping around the local [...]

I had a postmodern moment the other day. Bored with my iPod, I started flipping around the presets of my car radio when it happened. “Is that Czardas by Vittorio Monti on the local Top 40 station?” I wondered. “Wait… why is someone talk-singing over this? And why is there an Ace of Base sounding [...]

Earlier this month, Iran’s Tehran Symphony Orchestra concluded a goodwill tour across Europe. The group performed a piece called “The Peace and Friendship Symphony” by an Iranian composer. The message of the title is a little undermined by the fact that the piece was renamed from its original title, “The Islamic Revolution Symphony.” Well the [...]

A recent couple of headlines caught my attention because they seemed to be indicative of a larger trend in the music world. The first is that the Berklee College of Music has started a class that is specifically designed to teach students to compose for video games. This doesn’t surprise me at all largely because [...]

It’s no secret that the financial market for opera is dwindling. According to some statistics, the average age of an attendee at the Metropolitan Opera in New York was 60 in 2002. Perhaps more disturbing, the average age in 2007 was 65. Basic arithmetic reveals that the opera-going audience is literally dying off. So the [...]

We are in the midst of playoff football. And if your team is still alive, it’s all the better. So in honor of my Cowboy’s first playoff victory since I was 10 years old, I’ve decided to take a quick look at the music that has helped pump up rabid fans and shaped the auditory [...]

The Decade That Was
Trying to figure out the significance of a particular moment in history is a little like standing in the middle of a crop circle and guessing what the pattern is. After all, there have been many music writers from the freelancer who torched Led Zeppelin’s first two albums in Rolling Stone to [...]

A few years back, The New York Times ran a great story that profiled so-called “music stylists.” Way back when the word “subprime” was best known as a designation of quality for meat products, a class of the super-rich spent countless millions importing just the right couch from far-flung corners of the globe. But for [...]

It’s official; the Christmas season is upon us. For those of us who aren’t waiting to shop at the last minute, chances are that you have already heard Wham!’s “Last Christmas (I gave you my heart)” more times than you would care to. The holidays are a funny thing. Some comedian once pointed out that [...]

I was recently given an interesting book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson, for a birthday present. In the book, Wilson explores what is taste, how our taste biases are formed and whether or not we can truly objectively condemn others for not sharing our taste pallet. [...]