Author Archives: Andrew Waggoner

Persistence of Vision

Our last post, which could have been titled Persistence of Energy, or maybe Persistence of Andy’s Interest in Far-Flung Connections, makes a fitting, if admittedly elliptical, prelude to the one you’re now reading: Persistence of Vision: Welcome the WCM 2015 Summer Season! Hooray! Summer is here! No more black holes;...

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Message From Beyond…

I had the good fortune to hear Roger Penrose on the radio a couple of weeks ago. Penrose is, of course, the mind who, along with Stephen Hawking, first posited the nature and mechanics of black holes. Penrose was talking about the big bang, painting a very different picture of...

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What We Love

WCM’s 2014 summer season is now history, and truly one for the record books. I loved all of it, luxuriated in it even, and when I think about it now I’m amazed, stupefied really, at how much we were able to pull off in a scant two-week period. So many things came together, with such beauty and grace, thanks to the incredible work of so many people, that when it was over one could only feel both very lucky and utterly exhausted.

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Back in the USA

Whoa, back in the States! After six months in France, culminating in a wonderful concert as part of the series Rencontres d’été de musique de chambre (Summer Chamber Music Encounters) we’re back at home and well into the first week of WCM, just like that. Wham! It’s good to be...

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Bisous

In May of 1974 I played Debussy’s Prélude, à l’apres-midi d’un faune for the first time, with the New Orleans Civic Symphony. This was also the first time I had heard the work, and, as anyone who plays or sings on more than a passing basis will attest, there is...

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Spotify This!

A student wrote me recently and asked for my thoughts on online music services. The bleakness of my response surprised even me: That’s easy to answer: it has completed the process, begun 50 years ago with the rise of modern technologically-based pop music, of transforming music into commodity. While all...

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Flow

“I am haunted by waters.” Those words of Norman Maclean’s, from A River Runs Through It, have been haunting us; we’ve been thinking about, hearing, literally and figuratively swimming in water lately, in ways that all, through one channel or another, lead back to WCM. In recent days this water-consciousness has centered on the...

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Titles are a trick…

Transformations. That’s the title of this year’s festival, now already well underway, and already transformative. Titles are a trick: when they work they open up previously boarded up doors of understanding for an audience; they suggest a through-line, a thread to follow through the labyrinth; they illuminate connections between different...

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Chamber of Blogs

Wow, a blog. I’m not sure how I’ve managed to maintain a web presence for over ten years now without keeping one, but somehow I have. I’ve certainly run my mouth off on other people’s, but haven’t seen it as either personally necessary or serving some greater good for me...

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