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Daffodils, again--bookending the week with everybody's favorite perennial! This song was a persistent backdrop to my first few months in NYC. Everything in it combines to powerfully suggest the things we can't communicate: the insistent waves of static harmony, the...
Tori Amos is a truly captivating performer. Example: I made the mistake of keeping the youtube track running as I was coming up with this intro and quickly forgot how to form words in my brain and type them, as her voice overrode my mental circuits. Amos runs the...
Many works by the famed medieval poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut are formes fixes: complex musico-poetic structures requiring skill and finesse to create. This is an example of one such form, a rondeau. In order for a rondeau to work, the first phrase has to...
What is it about vocoders? They add a distance to the human voice that, in the skilled hands of Laurie Anderson, renders it omnipotent, supernatural. And marching through the uncanny valley right alongside her processed singing is that "ah ah ah" ostinato, both...
The underrated Earl Kim's setting of Samuel Beckett's "thither" occurs twice in Now and Then, Kim's 1981 song cycle for soprano, flute, viola, and harp. At just over 30 seconds, "thither" the song is a haunting shiver, a ghost aria, unforgettable even without the...