Musical Space

Good and bad things have happened to music with the invention of headphones more than a hundred years ago.

(Music: Kendrick Lamar, “Alright”, ) This is “Alright,” from Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly . There are so many amazing things going on, but my favorite part is the jarring silence. The dramatic pause is one of the most powerful things a composer can do. It’s a punctuation mark, a caesura, a place to breathe. But musical pauses don’t function as moments of repose; if anything, they ramp up the tension as the listener wonders what will happen next. It’s more like a comedian’s

Wes Anderson movies are a definite thing. Take his set design: earnest, quirky, and obsessive. Every shot is a consummation of painstaking detail. The camera is straight-on, elements are arranged at meticulous right angles with uncanny symmetry, color palates are precise and constrained. The same fastidious care is given to the choice of songs for his soundtracks. Anderson shows us how closely music can be integrated into the concept and design of a movie. Because stock wallpaper music would

Now that fake news is being reported by real news, I thought it would be good to look into how much fakery goes on in the music business. Sure, there’s autotune and lip-synching, but in the business of music the chicanery goes even deeper. Pop success is measured in sales numbers, and fudging those numbers is as old as the Billboard charts. For years record companies have leaned on stores, by bribery or coercion, to report inflated sales numbers to push whatever they want to be the next hit.

Professional musicians can write off business expenses from their taxable income, just as with any other profession; for them the cost of clarinet reeds and guitar strings is carefully tallied annually. The rest of us can also get a tax benefit from music, but only in the form of charitable donations. New tax laws have somewhat disincentivized charitable giving going forward, but you still have a week to donate to a music charity for the 2017 tax year. Great and lasting art rarely nets a lot of

You could travel to some amazing music festivals all over the world this season, but the best place to connect with people is in your own backyard. There are all kinds of festivals within a day’s drive, and I’m willing to bet they’ll give you a more meaningful time than if you went to California to join 75,000 other people at Coachella. For heavy fock you might want to check out Rocklahoma in Pryor, Oklahoma, starting May 25. Less than 4 hours away, prog virtuosos A Perfect Circle are headlining

With spring just a few days away, Mark Foley says it’s time for Music Festival Season. Festivals have had a profound effect on music ever since the Newport Jazz Festival started in 1954, or possibly as far back as Stonehenge.

This commentary originally aired on March 3, 2015. You’ve all heard about The Mozart Effect, the theory that listening to classical music will “make you smarter.” Whether or not research bears this out, the Mozart Effect has become a rallying cry for music educators and is even a trademarked way to sell CDs to parents hoping their kids would eventually get high-paying jobs. Personally, I think everybody is missing the boat. Music has much higher value than its potential to raise kids' math

With Planet Comic Con coming to Kansas City this weekend, it’s a good time to show appreciation for what nerds, geeks and other assorted dweebs have done for musical culture. It’s easy to make fun of them, but let’s not forget that nerds are the driving force of our digital lives, and the potential for a nerd overthrow of our musical power structure is unlimited.

Weirdly, one of this country’s most popular musical events is a football game - the annual Super Bowl Halftime show. It gets ratings far higher than any concert broadcast - five times the viewers of the Grammy Awards. A sports tournament is not the ideal time and place for an artistic statement. But still it’s worth asking: can the halftime show be a good musical experience? You gotta sympathize, the NFL is in the business of organizing games, not promoting concerts. The early shows came off as