“There was another full moon earlier this week, on Monday. I do hope you’ll forgive me for missing the actual evening of the full moon. As life has begun resuming a sense of normalcy in fits and starts, I am finding myself being unaccustomed to balancing a slightly more complicated schedule now that I am fully vaccinated, and it is safer to go out in the world again…”

“It’s another full moon tonight, so here is the second installment of my little Moon Song project for 2021. This month, I was drawn to Ned Rorem’s setting of Walt Whitman’s poem, Look Down, Fair Moon…”

“Today is Day 30.

I so was looking forward to writing a post celebrating the success of this 30 day challenge to write a post every day, but in the end, I am not able to do that. Instead, I feel that I need to write about the new low this current wave of anti-Asian violence has reached this week…”

“During last night’s episode of Heard Over The Piano, Sasha Cooke spoke a bit about the singer’s stigma of being a ‘good musician’. While that initially sounds like a compliment, early on in her career she had the impression that many believe that ‘being a good musician’ was really a euphemism for ‘not a good singer’…”

…rather than studying mythical ‘golden ages past’, history is most fascinating when it is telling the story of ‘now’. As we celebrate a supposed century of women’s suffrage in the United States, it’s painful to understand that the right to vote remains under constant assault…

…If we really want to effect lasting anti-racist change in the operatic industry and art form, we need to focus on systems – not people. Because of its reliance on external, industry-wide consultation, the situation at the Richard Tucker Music Foundation presents a unique opportunity to examine the systems that maintain the operatic White status quo….

“I have a vivid memory of my parents taking me to see Midori perform at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, MI. I was about 9 years old, and a group of local Suzuki violin students went to see this prodigy, who had already catapulted to international fame by the time she was our age. When we saw her, she couldn’t have been more than 17…”