Author Archives: Scott Foglesong

I was relieved when I realized that I needn’t fret about the implications of Michael Daugherty’s music. And I was most definitely fretting there for a while. My knickers were getting into knots. I had the willies and the heebie-jeebies. … Continue reading →

Talk about your itty-bitty profession: we classical music commentators make up a huddled little clutch indeed. Every city of any size or pretensions to gentility contains a few of us, but compare our paltry numbers with—oh, I don’t know—dentists. Imagine … Continue reading →

A halo descends on select groups of people. Assassinated presidents, for example: to be sure, Lincoln and JFK deserve theirs, albeit for different reasons. But it’s harder to remember much about Garfield or McKinley except for their having been abruptly … Continue reading →

Conservatories used to be a lot easier to figure out. The grandfather Neapolitan schools—San Onofrio, Turchini, Loreto, and Gesu Cristo—operated under a basic assumption that they were training young men to play an instrument, sing, or write music. Period. To … Continue reading →

In 1983 a friend and I attended the screening of the reconstructed version of the Judy Garland/James Mason A Star is Born, a movie made the year I was born. Not being a star myself, I understand that the title … Continue reading →

Today I’m going to play audio reviewer; my subject is headphones. For whatever reason, I have a goodly number of cans sitting around the house. My everyday home-listening headphones are exalted high-end puppies, Sennheiser HD 800s—top of the line from … Continue reading →

There’s a nifty new video out from Opus Arte of a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the reconstructed Globe. It’s given the whole-hog authentic performance—in daylight, with actors in casual period costumes, musicians in the gallery above. … Continue reading →

I came across a strangely disconnected article on the subject of e-books. I read the thing through several times and came out of it confused as to the author’s intent and confounded as to any useful content. If I had … Continue reading →

About a week ago I posted an article here in which I questioned whether live, acoustic music is the only possible criterion for evaluating audio reproduction. I wasn’t conducting a serious study, but rather sharing some observations that were triggered … Continue reading →

Among my current writing assignments, one in particular is occupying my time these days—an article on music from Latin America. It’s for Playbill, to run for October and November both, so throughout its two-month window of visibility a horde of … Continue reading →