[We’re now into summer encore season so I can charge up for a brand-new season in September. Meanwhile, we’ve curated a series of encore presentations of some of the most popular programs from
Read MoreHere’s a simple question with a complicated answer: Who invented music? The answer is “No one knows.” We don’t know who was the first to sing a song or the first to conjure
Read MoreMost of us probably go through a phase where we decide we want to make music for ourselves. Maybe we’ll do it alone, or perhaps we want to be part of a band.
Read MoreEveryone likes a good conspiracy theory, right? Here are a few tinfoil hat theories that keep going round and round and round. (1) Kurt Cobain was murdered. This one just won’t go away.
Read MoreIf you’re into collecting vinyl records and you want to get really nerdy about it, here’s something you can look for. They’re called “Duophonic” releases. These were fake stereo records. Lemme explain. Until
Read MoreAll music that gets released today is, at a minimum, produced in stereo: two distinct channels (left and right) with the instrumentation and vocals mixed and balanced in such a way that our
Read MoreBeing creatures who crave organization, humans like to put things into nice, neat piles. That includes music, of course. Who doesn’t distinguish between sounds by using words like “rock,” “hip hop,” “pop” and
Read MoreIf you’re old enough, you’ll remember a dead recorded music format called the 8-track tape. Officially, they went out of production in the 80s as everyone moved to cassettes and then CDs. But
Read MoreAfter World War II, Germany was destroyed. The country was divided. The East was under the control of the USSR. The western part was part of democratic Europe. And then there was Berlin,
Read MoreModern electronic sampling has been with us since the early 1980s. This is when you use some specialized hardware and software to surgically excise a passage from an old piece of music that
Read MoreYou might have a friend who just isn’t into music. They might even find music annoying. This is a genuine medical condition called “amusia.” This happens when the brain can’t process or recognize
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