Author Archives: Scott Foglesong

The dust settles. Paul Ryan blames it all on unexpectedly high numbers of “urban” (read: poor, non-white, minority) voters turning out to vote. Mitt Romney blames it all on a fantasy that Obama put on a modern-day bread & circuses … Continue reading →

In April of this year I posted a despairing screed about the bleak future that lay in store for piano literature and the folks who play the instrument. While I remain skeptical about the instrument’s literature, I have encountered at … Continue reading →

The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninov’s works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favor. Talk about wrongheaded prognostication. That’s Eric Blom on Rachmaninoff in the 1954 edition of … Continue reading →

The lavish 1996 restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” premiered at San Francisco’s Castro Theater, with Kim Novak and Hitch’s daughter Patricia in attendance. I didn’t even bother trying to get a ticket; I was interested only in the restoration and … Continue reading →

Contrary to received wisdom amongst performing musicians, playing a cruise ship gig is not nirvana. It’s more like routine interspersed with gaping stretches of utter boredom. During my decade as a summertime cruise-ship regular, I read a ton of books … Continue reading →

Custom has it that breakfast alone, whether in a café or coffee shop or restaurant, is altogether right and proper. Lunch alone, ditto. Yet there’s something socially askew about having dinner solo in a nice restaurant. Dinner in a restaurant … Continue reading →

It has been a commonplace shibboleth to place Johann Sebastian Bach as a quasi-dinosaur in his own time, an old-world man out of step with the Enlightenment-sprung currents of the mid-18th century. Certainly his sons saw him as such—“the old … Continue reading →

This morning I sent my Advanced Analysis students off to their grand adventure, the first of a string of such forays to come. To the uninitiated, the adventure doesn’t sound particularly grand; to tell the truth, it doesn’t sound like … Continue reading →

Quite recently a student took issue with several of the grades I had given her on a solfège test. It should surprise nobody to hear that grades in question were other than A or B. She was put out with … Continue reading →

Fortune has smiled on music lovers worldwide: EMI has been remastering their enormous back catalog into hi-def and SACD issues. Nothing quite compares to the EMI catalog; even those great stalwarts RCA Victor and Deutsche Grammophon can’t quite capture the … Continue reading →