Category: music & dance

The Mythical Desert Island

If you could only hear a few pieces of music from now on, what would you want them to be?

Music, of course, is one of the ways we are coping with our self-sequestration from the outer world in this time of coronavirus/COVID-19. Luckily, over the years I have put together a collection of just under one terabyte of hi-res digital tracks ranging from 1904 Enrico Caruso to 2020 posthumous Leonard Cohen, and covering a multitude of genres. More music than I could probably ever hear over the rest of my life. And now is a perfect time to again dig into this lovely mess.

As I luxuriate in aural bliss, I recall how I used to work in my loft studio in Los Angeles while listing to KPFK, a non-commercial, listener-sponsored radio station that ran a weekend program in which guests — usually musicians or other celebrities — would describe and play their favorite music given the premise that this would be the music they would want to hear if exiled to a lonely desert island. (They may have called it something like “Castaways.”)  I started thinking about my own “desert island” choices, and would often debate the topic with my friends. A few years later, when I started my own music blog, I would often cite some of my personal desert island picks, such as in posts like this and this and this.

And now we come to the time of coronavirus and our self-imposed retreat from the outside world…

So just two days ago, I found that The New Yorker writer Hua Hsu posted a piece on the original “Desert Island Discs” BBC program that I had first heard, or had inspired the program I had heard years ago in LA. And I further discover that the program is still alive and well! (Just click the links in this paragraph to dig in.)

All this has stimulated me to start putting together my current desert island take; I am considering constructing a Spotify playlist to share with whomever might want to listen — maybe even my kids??!! That brings me to a further thought: if any of my readers have such a selection of two or three or ten pieces or albums of music that they would want to take to their own desert island, I’d like to know. Maybe I can publish lists of such choices here later on. Go for it; we’ll see what happens.  (Suggestion: If you can, please provide a Spotify [preferred] or YouTube URL for each of your choices.)

Oh, as for my own desert island picks?  Almost certainly would include the music of Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Tom Waits, J.S. Bach (and maybe some others like Miles Davis, Radiohead, Talking Heads, Max Richter, Arvo Pärt — stop me!) , but how to be more specific  right now?  That’s tough.

 

In the Time of Coronavirus: Nessun Dorma

Italian opera tenor Maurizio Marchini serenades his quarantined neighbors in Florence:

For more of and about Marchini’s balcony performances, see here and here.

SIDEBAR:  A post on Luciano Pavarotti, for whom Nessun Dorma was one of his signature pieces, and how I became really interested in opera (and how you may want to do so, too) -- here.