John Schaefer

Last year we polled our Soundcheck listeners for their pick of the Summer Song of 2007… now, my recollection was that the listeners correctly picked Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” which of course did go on to become the de facto anthem of last summer. But in checking the actual results, it seems ...

Is anybody REALLY surprised to find that babies respond to music? I don’t mean the so-called “Mozart effect,” which has been pretty well debunked at this point – even though lots of unscrupulous producers continue to market Classical Lite recordings to gullible parents. I mean the recent studies that show, ...

As longtime listeners will know, I am a huge fan of new music. My nightly “New Sounds” program here at WNYC has celebrated many types of new music since (gulp) 1982. So when I read Joe Queenan’s article, “Admit It, You’re As Bored As I Am,” my first inclination was ...

Sarfraz Manzoor’s book, “Greetings From Bury Park,” would seem to be pretty specific at first glance: the surprising story of how a young Pakistani immigrant to Britain deals with his strict Muslim father and the very different society around him – through the intermediary of Bruce Springsteen’s music.

The ...

So hip-hop is in trouble? Sales are down? The music's lost its edge? Sorry, but weren't we just saying those exact same things about rock a few years ago? And it turned out that rock wasn't dead at all - ...

When I was a kid, some of the older kids in my neighborhood in Queens were making noise about a concert they were going to see at Shea Stadium. Part of the excitement was just the fact that Shea was hosting a concert. And part of it was the band ...

I love music. I love live music. I love lots of live music. I just don't love it all at once. To me, that's one of the problems with the big summer music festivals - when the music is coming at you all day and into the evening, it doesn't ...

Music has probably been used as a weapon of war for as long as we’ve waged wars. The Scots marched with their highland pipes and drums because they believed the music would pump up their warriors – and if their enemies got ...

As Alex Ross points out in his recent article in the New Yorker, we’re being increasingly told that China is the future of classical music. The numbers are staggering – 30 million piano and/or violin students (conservatively – more enthusiastic numbers-crunchers say as many as 100 million); conservatories 10 ...

So I’m trying to figure out just what I think of live albums. My initial reaction is: not much. At least, not in rock music. If you like an artist or band enough to go see them live, odds are the recording of that very same event just won’t live ...

Today’s Smackdown is about Coldplay, but for me, you can’t talk about Coldplay without also talking about Radiohead. 40 years ago it was the Beatles or The Stones. Now it’s Coldplay or Radiohead – two British rock bands with big ambitions, grand ideas, and apparently unlimited time to muck around ...

What’s new? Well, a bunch of music venues are new – Drom, Le Poisson Rouge, the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, the High Line Ballroom. And there are new locations for some old ones – both Galapagos and the Issue Project Room are moving from their Brooklyn neighborhoods (Williamsburg and Gowanus, respectively) ...

Reading accounts of concerts in the days of Beethoven, it’s evident that what we now call Classical Music was in fact the arena rock of its time. Orchestras played almost free-form events, with movements of a symphony played again, immediately, if they went over well the first time, and solo ...

Is THAT music? It’s a question that has often been asked, usually in an incredulous tone, often by parents who greet their teenagers’ choice of music with a mix of confusion and revulsion. But it’s a question that critics asked ...

Music therapy sounds like such a great idea. And it actually seems plausible too – we’ve all noticed how a favorite song coming on the radio can be a real mood-lifter. So the idea of music having some kind of physical and/or psychological benefit seems quite rational. But it also ...

Dana Jennings’ story of how country music was so important to the lives of the people growing up poor in his New Hampshire hometown got me to thinking. Growing up in New York City, what did I know about country music? Very little, and that was the way I liked ...

The idea of hearing an Art Tatum performance live, half a century after Tatum himself died, is certainly intriguing. You listen to those recordings of his from the 40s, and it’s clear that he was one of the greatest virtuosos of the instrument this country has ever produced. But that’s ...

Pardon me while I date myself, but when I began making cassette mixtapes, in the 80s, I don’t think anyone was using the term “mixtape” yet. But I owned a cheap stereo with a cassette deck, was recently married, and incurable romantic that I ...

On the surface, classical music and hip-hop seem like the strangest of musical bedfellows. If you think about it, though, the best hip-hop producers are master orchestrators – but instead of using keeping Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Principles of Orchestration” handy they’ve got ProTools (the industry standard for digital audio programs) loaded on ...

Ah, the cell phone. What an amazing little gadget: it plays music videos, records brief movies, takes and shares photos, sends and receives instant messages, and I think you can talk into them too. Has any other device connected us so efficiently? Has any other device set concertgoers at each ...