On the Vagaries of Aesthetic Appreciation

In 1978, at age thirteen, I became a Bob Dylan fan thanks to his side of the multi-artist Concert for Bangladesh three-record set. My knowledge of Dylan’s life and work was extremely limited, but I was eager to learn and hear more, and my interest was piqued by his appearance that year in The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s …

Re-thinking Convention and Innovation

The end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) defies the conventions of film endings. After the credits are over, the music has stopped, and the screen has faded to darkness, we are suddenly confronted with an interior shot of Ferris Bueller’s (Matthew Broderick) home. Is this the start of a new movie? Did the film’s editors make a mistake and forget to remove some material from the final product?

Autistic and Epileptic, In a Rock Concert

By: Amy Sequenzia (Rockledge, Florida) // Being in a loud rock concert—where there are blinking lights, no places to sit, and a lot of people very close to each other—can be very overwhelming for most Autistic people. Many will avoid such events. And loud noises and lights can trigger seizures in those with epilepsy.   …

How Musicology Became That Town in Footloose

By: Sara Haefeli (Ithaca College) // The eleventh century music theorist Guido d’Arezzo is best known for his innovations in musical notation. But he also made a clear distinction between those who could contemplate music’s theoretical complexities and those who actually sang or performed. Guido called those in the first category musicus (musicians), and those …

Top 40: More Hits More Often

By: Ben Fong-Torres (San Francisco Chronicle) // From What’s That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and its History, Fourth Edition, by John Covach and Andrew Flory (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015) It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time, not long ago, when radio was declared dead. In the early 1950s, television was …