Category: Uncategorized
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How Green Was My Valley
I am the last lawnmower on my block. By that I mean not just that I’m the only person left who mows my own lawn, but that I’m always the last on the block to get around to it. This is somewhat embarrassing—I often sense (or imagine) my neighbors, all…
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Women’s History Month: A Soldier’s Life
Though she lived a hardscrabble existence her whole life long, Sampson is proof positive that women don’t have to be confined to any one lifestyle or identity.
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Women’s History in the Making: Sailing into the Record Books
What better time than Women’s History Month for a woman to make history, as Cole Brauer did when she became the first woman to race a sailboat solo and non-stop around the world? And how cool is it that the woman who accomplished this feat is what the male chauvinists…
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Black Voices Matter, Pt. 3: The Tenors
One of my favorite near-miss stories is that, shortly after my twin sister and I were born, my parents went shopping for a new (larger) apartment and looked at one that was right upstairs, or maybe downstairs, from the apartment of George Shirley. We could have grown up listening through…
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Black Voices Matter
Time was when Black singers were not welcome on U.S. opera stages, or black audiences in many classical-music venues. The story of Marian Anderson’s historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial when the Daughters of the American Revolution denied her the use of their Constitution Hall says as much about Black…
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The Newspaper of Record
It’s fun to get a letter to the editor published in The New York Times. If you’re a writer, it’s fun to get published anywhere, even if you don’t get paid. In the case of the Times letters section, it’s particularly fun, as an insignificant private citizen, to have your…
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I Laughed, I Cried …
This month, the music world lost not one but two towering figures at once—P.D.Q. Bach, billed as the last and oddest of J. S. Bach’s twenty-some-odd sons; and Peter Schikele, the serious composer and silly musicologist who “discovered” him. Sad as I was to hear of Professor Schikele’s death, just…
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Public Servants
I remember a time when politicians considered themselves public servants, or at least paid lip service to the idea that that was what they were supposed to be. In those days, a candidate could win reelection by supporting legislation that improved the lot of his constituents, or advanced the prestige…
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The Wonderful White World of Winter
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as winter in New York City. You wouldn’t have known it in recent seasons, when wet, icky days of rain and wind have all but replaced the blissful beauty of a blizzard, and the chance of an actual pond freezing over has been…
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Sounds of the Season, Pt. III
Some of you may be of the opinion that by the fifth of January, I should have moved on to the sounds of the next season, though I’m not quite sure what that might be — the waltzes of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Celebration? (Yes, I did enjoy that,…
Louise T. Guinther 