Author Archives: Scott Foglesong

[The] feeling, power, originality, and beauty of folksong being a salvation in unmelodic times. —Max Bruch I think I’ve got it. By George, I think I’ve got it. The problem with modern scores, especially those by earnest younger hopefuls who … Continue reading →

After many years of faithful if undistinguished service, my Epson scanner bit the big one and is now headed off to electronic Valhalla. For some weeks it had inexplicably and unexpectedly frozen, then recovered, then frozen again. Finally it was … Continue reading →

We’re in the midst of a retail bonanza. The record labels, ever mindful of the money yet to be made from their vast back catalogs, have been gleefully releasing box sets of their great artists of the past. We, the … Continue reading →

I hereby elect musical downsizing as a pointless evil of the modern musical world. I’m sick and tired and fed up with and just plain through with modernist, HIP-infused, prissy, snippy, joyless damn shrinking down of musical works into itty … Continue reading →

Having sat patiently through the SF Opera’s premiere of Tobias Picker’s Dolores Claiborne, a brand-new opera from a most unlikely source—Stephen King’s novel-then-movie—I am ever more certain that contemporary opera is on a fast track to nowhere. There is no … Continue reading →

Henry Louis Mencken once quipped that we have lost more great art to constipation than to all the wars of the world combined. He was being a bit glib, facetious even, but his words had teeth. Nobody can create anything … Continue reading →

I couldn’t have been more than five or six when I fell head over heels in love with a cheap kid’s toy on sale at our local Kroger supermarket. It was a kiddy-sized car dashboard, complete with windshield, turn indicator, … Continue reading →

In the course of preparing a program note on Dvořák’s “New World” symphony I had occasion to read through the initial spate of reviews and studies that accompanied the work’s 1893 premiere by Anton Seidl and the New York Philharmonic. … Continue reading →

Something went screwy in the 20th century. That’s a silly statement: a lot went screwy. Holocausts, nuclear armageddon, terrorism, world wars. Perhaps I should narrow my topic. So let’s try that again. Something went screwy with musical careers in the … Continue reading →

As the school year approaches it occurs to me that I haven’t been teaching my Advanced Analysis course—a full year of Schenkerian analysis—as well as I might. A generation ago practical working musicians shunned Schenkerian theory as forbiddingly cerebral, but … Continue reading →