New Orleans jazz funerals turn mourning into movement, blending African diasporic deathways, Christian ritual, brass bands, mutual...
Music
Ancient sacred music did more than accompany worship; it summoned gods, shaped memory, protected communities, and made...
Indigenous song and dance shaped Christian festivals in New Spain, carrying rhythm, affect, memory, and cultural negotiation...
African American gospel music transformed sorrow, worship, and protest into a sacred sound of survival, liberation, and...
The harmonica’s history stretches from ancient Chinese free-reed technology to German factories, migration, blues, country, gospel, and...
Native American musical instruments carried memory, ceremony, movement, breath, and survival through centuries of adaptation, colonization, revival,...
The electric guitar began as a quest for volume, then transformed popular music, technology, performance, and American...
Ancient Near Eastern scribes transformed fleeting sound into durable knowledge, preserving sacred song, tuning systems, and music’s...
Guillaume de Machaut transformed medieval music by uniting poetry, polyphony, sacred sound, and manuscript preservation into one...
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has carried ideals of joy and human unity while serving revolutions, regimes, protest movements,...
Stephen Foster helped create American popular song, but his melodies carried beauty, commerce, racial caricature, and national...
From mourning songs to concert tributes, music helped Americans remember, reinterpret, and claim Abraham Lincoln across generations...
American vaudeville transformed comedy, celebrity, censorship, touring, film, and radio into the foundations of modern mass entertainment....
From Greek choruses to Broadway scores, music has carried theater’s emotion, rhythm, spectacle, and storytelling power across...
Medieval farces and soties used fools, tricksters, courts, households, and public laughter to expose the fragile performance...
From Old Comedy to viral protest, street theater has used satire, spectacle, and interruption to make power...
In an era dominated by streaming platforms and instant access to millions of songs, the resurgence of...
Creating custom music for videos, games, and ads traditionally required a significant investment in professional skills, expensive...
A piano in your home is a centerpiece. It’s the elegant backdrop to holiday gatherings, a conversation...
Exploring gospel music’s essential place as an outlet for African Americans to express their spiritual and cultural...
Greenfield forced people to reconcile their ears with their racism. Introduction In 1851, a concert soprano named Elizabeth...
The original form of ancient Greek tympanon, a big hand-drum with a roaring sound, lives on in...
The church dates from 1208, and in 1361 a large organ (not there now) was installed. By...
The guitar in Tudor England was the instrument of gentlemen, the middling sort, and of apprentices. In...
The banjo was introduced by enslaved Africans and continued to evolve in the Americas. When I was...
What “dance” meant in the Byzantine context is not always clear. By Dr. Leslie BrubakerProfessor Emerita of...
Some concertgoers reported being so moved by their first concerts due to the pandemic in nearly two...
The craze for castrati in England started relatively late. Introduction For most of the people in this...
Richard Strauss did not specify what precisely his music was attempting to remember. By Jeremy EichlerClassical Music...
Investing in a bass guitar is a significant decision for musicians, whether just starting or aiming to...