Reading Time: 5 minutes I started teaching college music courses in 1991. I was 28, just five years out of college myself. On the first day of my music appreciation class, I asked the students to name a few songs or bands that they liked to listen to, that they found interesting. There was some Nirvana, Nirvana was big […]
Music
Exploring the world of music from a secular perspective.
Posted inMusic
Meet Molly Tuttle, the best bluegrass guitarist in the world (with videos!)
Reading Time: 2 minutes Twenty-nine-year-old Molly Tuttle is the best bluegrass guitarist in the world right now, and that’s never happened before, not to Molly or to any other woman east or west of the Appalachian mountains. (Don’t you dare miss the videos of her playing below.) Bluegrass music, since its inception in the 1940s, was a man’s world, […]
Posted inMusic
The lived contradiction of atheist choir directors
Reading Time: 6 minutes After I put out a call for atheist public school choir directors to interview for a research article, I received an email from a colleague: “The choral music education program of any school must include music from the masters, which of course will include some sacred music. It is a part of our culture.” I […]
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Report: Sex abuse allegations against Christian singer Chris Rice ‘credible’
Reading Time: 3 minutes After 18 months, an investigation into alleged sex abuse by the Christian musician Chris Rice has found that the accusations against him are “credible.” It’s a remarkable fall for the singer, songwriter, and youth pastor. Rice’s history in the world of contemporary Christian music (CCM) is a fairly successful one. In 1998, he was nominated […]
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Flickerstick and the importance of passion
Reading Time: 7 minutes If you saw Flickerstick live, consider yourself lucky. They should have been the biggest band in the world…
Posted inMusic
When mind and music fall apart
Reading Time: 8 minutes OnlySky · When mind and music fall apart | Dale McGowan My mom is slipping away. I don’t mean she’s dying, although she’s doing that too, gradually. But it’s her mind I’m talking about. And because it’s her mind, it’s her self, my mom, who’s slipping away. A few weeks ago she said, “I didn’t […]
Posted inPsychology
Solving the musical mystery of my life
Reading Time: 3 minutes Ever since I was a wee babe, one song always made me spontaneously burst into tears: “Wiegenlied,” better known as Brahms’s Lullaby: For at least the first 20 years of my life, just a few notes of Brahms’s Lullaby would draw a convulsive wet snurk from my face. My brothers would miss no opportunity. In the […]
Posted inArts
Original > Perfect
Reading Time: 4 minutes When singing, what’s more important: hitting all the right notes, or capturing the feel of a song? I have a very strong opinion…
Posted inMusic
The most hopeful music in the world
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s hard to know when to broach the subject of mid-20th-century radical modernist composers with your kids. My daughter was six when I decided it was time. At bedtime one night I told her the story of a piece of music by John Cage—and this piece so captured her imagination that she still mentions it […]
Posted inMusic
Thank no god for XTC
Reading Time: 3 minutes In the beginning, there was XTC. And by the beginning, I mean the dawn of the contemporary atheist awakening: the explosion of best-selling books by the New Atheists, the proliferation of thousands of humanist groups all over the world, the emergence of movements like Camp Quest, Black Nonbelievers, Ex-Muslims of North America, the Secular Student […]