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Barack the Music

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Raise your hand if you’ve seen the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, directed by Stephen Herek. Raise your hand if you liked it, and if you thought there was a salient message about the arts embedded therein.
My hand is up. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, which — since it’s a rather dorky thing to see — I’m guessing is most of you, Mr. Holland’s Opus is about an inspiring music teacher, Glenn Holland. Although most of the movie focuses on how he manages to get through to his students, and how music helps him to connect with his deaf son, at the end he is forced into early retirement by arts-related budget cuts. Hmm.

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Finding Ourselves in the Music We Love

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In many ways, music defines us. In other ways, it helps us to be someone entirely different, to be all that we can’t be, if you will. One might look at the ways we use music to demonstrate who we want to be, or the ways in which a country singer’s music actually fits in with the person they are. I think I might even go so far as to say my music choices have reflected the evolution of my persona. Memory lane, here we come.

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Brisingr

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If you read my articles on a regular basis you may have noticed a common theme: I’m a nerd. I play the trombone; I watch anime; I devour science-fiction and the shelves of my book-case are littered with fantasy novels (and every Little House on the Prairie book ever written). And now, the most recent edition is Brisingr (or The Seven Promises of Eragon Shadeslayer and Saphira Bjartskular), the third installment of Christopher Paolini’s four-book Inheritance Cycle.

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Note to All: Band Together

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I think everyone should get to enjoy playing in a band at least once. And by band, I mean many things. You don’t have to rock a guitar in a pseudo-punk garage group (or whatever) to have a kick ass time. You can play in a marching band, an orchestra, a jazz band, do something crazy new-age with sound boards, or bring back the didgeridoo.
In high school, I was a total band geek. I even had the stereotypical head gear — though, thankfully, my orthodontist (Dr. Hand) only required that I wear it at night. I played trombone in the wind ensemble and jazz band throughout high school and, I have to say, it was a lot of fun. I miss it now.

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Wooooord! C.U. MFAs

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You know the person you bumped into at Temple of Zeus today? When your elbow knocked into his or her oh-so-delicious soup and sent it flying over his or her body and spilling onto the stack of pages he or she lovingly clutched to his or her chest? Well, that person may very well have been Cornell’s next Kurt Vonnegut, and those pages you accidentally destroyed may just have been the next great, American novel. (Good job.)

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To Mosh or Not To Mosh?

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As you no doubt are aware, one very delightful way to enjoy music is by attending a concert. In our modern day and age, concerts come in many forms. They are high school band concerts, Fanclub shows, marching band numbers at C.U. football games, the Backstreet Boys reunion tour … wouldn’t that be AWESOME? They adhere to stereotypes held by the old (“Damn kids, with their rock and roll!”), and to those held by the young (“OMG, classical music sux!”).
We go to concerts for many reasons. For example, a mother might go to her son’s clarinet recital because she is proud of her son, or a Bible Belt resident may attend a Christian rock concert for some spiritual indulgence — or because attendance is equivalent to an indulgence in the pre-Enlightenment sense. Either way.

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Jerry Stiller's Married to Laughter

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I recently finished Jerry Stiller’s Married to Laughter: A Love Story featuring Anne Meara. Now, normally, Jerry Stiller’s autobiography is not something I would have picked up on my own (no offense to Mr. Stiller of course), being a consumer of politics and science fiction (e.g. a nerd). So why’d I read it?

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Don't Worry, Be Happy

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I want you to stop for a second and think about music. What does it mean to you? When do you listen to it? When do you play it? What do you use it for? This might be, if you’re really thinking about it, an enormous list. We use music to celebrate, to mourn, to get together and PAR-TAY, to reflect a huge range of emotions, to calm us down, to pump us up, for the simple beauty of sound.

76 Trombones: Ears to the Ground In Ithaca

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Hello. My name is Julia Woodward. You may recognize it from numerous other Daily Sun contributions throughout the years (note the sound of me tooting my horn, please), but here I am undertaking something that is an entirely new experience for me. I am going to write a column about music. This prospect scares me in a do-I-really-know-what-the-eff-I’m-talking-about kind of way. But I’m going to do it anyway, because I really love music. Yes, everyone does; and yes, many, many people probably love it more than I do — I can name more than several off the top of my head — but I think all that means is that it’s worth writing about it. So, deep breath. Here goes.

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Local Band, Immature Youth, Comes of Age … Again

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Local band IY hasn’t gone by Immature Youth since their bygone middle school days, and with their third album For Fire (set to be released May 17) the title has been left completely behind. The band’s sophomore release, Two Letters, was pretty grown-up, but For Fire (which I will refer to as the second coming … of age) has stepped way out of the box and up to the plate. Uhh, mic. Up to the mic.