Arts & Culture
The Titans of Anabel Taylor Chapel: Richards, Yearsley and the Baroque Organ
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Last fall, I had the pleasure of taking David Yearsley’s course on Music Journalism. Within discussions of style, diction and structure, Yearsley’s classes taught close analysis of journalistic delivery and choice of words. Unlike most of my English classes, where professors struggle to hook the attention of non-majors and majors alike, Yearsley pulls his students’ personalities into the class, creating a parallel between our learning of a journalist’s writing, character and opinion in the context of our own work.
In the fall, we each wrote nine articles, including a book review and an obituary. For my live music review, I chose to attend my first organ concert, a part of the Midday Music concert series, where I saw Yearsley’s partner, Annette Richards, perform a series of enchanting Bach pieces in Anabel Taylor Chapel. Writing about music I was so unfamiliar with should have been challenging, but because of the way the class had sharpened my writing skills, it flowed with the magic that the Bach scores had borne in the space.
