This past Easter Sunday (April 9) marked the 70th anniversary of Marian Anderson’s famed concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. What occasioned the open-air performance in 1939 was the refusal of the Daughters of the American Revolution to let Ms. Anderson appear at Washington’s largest concert venue, Constitution Hall, because of the color of her skin. At the time, she was the world’s leading contralto, the “supreme representative of her voice category,” as Alex Ross writes in the April 13 issue of
The New Yorker. Arturo Toscanini said she was the kind of singer who comes along once every hundred years.
[Read more →]
Tags: great music by Jon O
No Comments »
Bells in the Russian Orthodox tradition are not just bells. Because they are not tuned to a major or minor chord, as Western European bells commonly are, they don’t represent a note or a chord but, rather, the voice of God. So says Father Roman in an article by Elif Batuman in the April 27 issue of The New Yorker. This untuned voice contains numerous partial frequencies with only approximate relations to traditional pitches. Russian bells don’t play carillon melodies — they just sound. [Read more →]
Detroit — unlike cities such as Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans — has never been able to cash in on its famous musical history. Despite being well known as the birthplace of Motown, not to mention major artists from Aretha Franklin to Madonna, there is little to mark the fact that the Detroit metro area is one of the most significant places when talking about the history of American music. So why isn’t the Detroit music scene a major tourist draw? 
