The first film score of independent artistic merit and dominant coloration of the dramatic action was not Duke Ellington’s famous score to Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), but Miles Davis’ score to Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958), a lesser known film that is nonetheless a paragon of French film noir. Evidently, […]

Last month the Ciompi Quartet generously and expertly performed Caroline Shaw’s “Entre’Acte” for the students and parents of the Mallarmé Youth Chamber Orchestra at the University of North Carolina. I have no preference for contemporary classical music, and indeed I’ve argued in these pages that jazz is the genuine classical music of the American twentieth […]

I’ve often applauded the Blue Note album covers of the 1950s and 60s as the greatest achievement in the history of American commercial design. Nearly all of these album covers, about five hundred of them, were designed by a single man named Reid Miles, as were many of Prestige’s equally arresting album covers. As Giotto […]

Brendan Toller’s documentary I Need That Record! The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store (2008) tells the story of the demise of the independent record store, though it might just as well tell the story of the demise of the independent video or book store, all of which were victims of box […]

I first heard Bach’s choral prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (“I call to thee, Lord Jesus Christ”) in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). It seems to me one of the most beautiful compositions, and Tarkovsky’s scene, in which the piece harmonizes with the camera as it plays over Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow (1565), […]