John Schaefer

In the NY Times recently, Anthony Tommasini wrote about how he supports the idea of modern opera, of contemporary composers trying to extend and even reinvent the opera tradition for modern times and for modern America particularly. He also wrote ...

It’s a happy coincidence that today, the opening of WNYC’s fundraising drive, brings Dana Gioia, the chairman of the NEA, to our studio. After all, WNYC and the NEA both survived tough times in the early 90s, when New York’s mayor wanted to get rid of one and political conservatives ...

Recently, a reporter doing a story on music during hard times asked me if I agreed with the notion that music gets darker and moodier when the economy tanks. I thought of the Great Depression hit, “Brother Can You Spare A ...

Buena Vista Social Club, the group of elderly Cuban musicians who’d been rescued from obscurity and poverty by a record made almost by accident, has become such a phenomenon that it’s difficult to remember how it all happened. The World Circuit Recording, Ry Cooder’s trip to Cuba (he told us ...

It really did seem like a good idea at the time. Invite listeners to write lyrics, pick a winner out of the handful or couple of dozen entries, have a band perform the song in the studio… everyone has fun, no one gets hurt, everybody goes home happy.

That ...

I like the fact that mega-selling artists like Jay Z and Lil Wayne will apparently appear on anyone’s record, anywhere, anytime. It shows that these guys, even though they’ve “made it” and probably don’t need the additional work and exposure, still enjoy going into the studio and playing nicely with ...

We live in a sampled world. Our dominant music genre, hip hop, is built on samples of earlier songs, often quick bursts of percussion or catchy hooks from former pop hits. Our blockbuster movies take captured video elements – visual samples, essentially – and manipulate them through both space and ...

So yesterday, I’m on the plane flying back from Paris, and since I’d already seen a couple of the English-language movies on offer, and didn’t feel like trying to make out the subtitles on the French films, I watched an indie Scottish flick called ...

One of the reasons we love sports is because it gives us something to argue about. It just wouldn’t have been as much fun growing up a Yankees fan in Queens if I hadn’t been growing up in a family of Mets fans. My brother Jerry and I would argue ...

Two visual artists, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, have created a project called Fleshmap as a visual representation of desire – an easily digested way of showing how humans approach one another’s bodies. The site has pages devoted to the sense of sight, or touch, and a page devoted ...

So Van Morrison has banned booze at his UK concerts. The idea of banning alcohol at a concert makes about as much sense as banning beer at the ballpark. Look, no one wants to have to deal with drunken audience members – not the musicians, not the hall owners, and ...

The French have this great saying, entre chien et loup. Literally, “between a dog and a wolf,” but of course it’s much more poetic than that – it is used to describe that time of day when the light is fading ...

So Metallica is atop the Billboard 200 chart. Sort of reminds me of the 70s and 80s, when the Billboard album charts regularly featured rock bands. Now? Not so much. Aside from heavy metal (Metallica at #1, Slipknot at #12), there is almost no rock music atop the Billboard charts. ...

The big thing in gyms now is apparently music. Various production houses, most notably Muzak, have created music services specifically with gyms and health clubs in mind. The idea is to use music to motivate the gym rats to step it up a notch, on the theory that music will ...

While writing his article about Bernstein in today’s Daily News, David Hinckley asked if we could talk a bit about Bernstein’s legacy in general, his connection to WNYC in particular, and even more specifically, about what I thought of him. I repeated, for the twentieth time this week, the strange ...

While Dave Thompson’s book “I Hate New Music” may be an exercise in hyperbole and provocation, it does make a rather familiar point: many people feel that the music they grew up with is simply the best music ever made. It is almost painfully obvious to anyone who grew up ...

Another season at the Met opens this week, and the somewhat traditional opener (Renee Fleming’s voice on display in three acts from three different operas) belies the fact that opera is actually opening up to more contemporary ideas. Peter Gelb at the Met and the incoming Gerard Mortier at the ...

As I mentioned on Wednesday’s blog, country music wasn’t really my thing, at least while growing up here in the city. But I was aware that some of the better known singers were women – Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, and much later on people like Shania Twain. Since I didn’t ...

In general, I’m not a big fan of reunion tours. I’m trying to figure out why I feel this way, even when it’s bands I like. Part of it is watching the aging process at work. When Devo takes the stage ...

I am a city boy – always have been. And so country music has long been my musical blind spot. Now, I have to say, in my own defense, that country music itself is at least partially responsible for my longtime ignorance: all that slick, overproduced Nashville stuff tends to ...