Brachial pendulum. picture of piano keyboard
No-context archival find: the pianist's body, pictured in reduced form as a "brachial pendulum."
source: Breithaupt, "Natural Piano-technic," 1909.
What bothers me the most is the “‘8pm primetime Eastern’ capitulation to entertainment capitalism” of it all.
Resonance (UC Press) is looking for humanities research across the following topics: Sound in Political Crisis, Sound and Social Justice, Experiments in Sound, Sound Archives and Preservation, and we're convening a permanent series that'll examine "Film and Cinema Sound" this Fall. Please circulate!
My new article looks at sight-reading (déchiffrage) as a peculiar form of performative labor—especially for female pianists at the Paris Conservatoire. Happy to share a pdf!
online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-...
Sound, Space, & Place course flyer
My Dept is in the midst of a massive curricular overhaul. One of the changes was to our 3-semester music history survey. We've compressed it into 2 semesters, freeing the last for Topics. I'm offering one on urban sonic geography in Fall 2026. Anyone who's taught a class like this, LMK how it went!
(research for a book chapter on automated musical notation and machine [sight]-reading)
Also, the cover should be a t-shirt.
Computers don't actually think. You just think they think. (We Think.)
Archival gem: from Ted Nelson, "Computer Lib/Dream Machines," 1974.
If you asked me what I’ve been up to recently, I’d say “nothing much, parenting and writing stories.”
Pleased to see “Party in Tiltsville, Florida” reprinted in @theargylelitmag.bsky.social More stuff is coming!
www.theargylelitmag.com/fiction-7/pa...
Hot take: let’s thank Tim Chally for the free publicity??
Mine is “presumably” for some reason. My advisor’s voice, presumably.
Turandot in concert at Music Hall Detroit. Excellent singers sang excellently; projected visuals of palaces and ponds delivered in 4k crispness. Gongs gonged, pagodas pagoded. And confetti for the happy couple! Opera uncritically celebrating its own Opera-ness.
A socialist mayor who succeeds at snow removal is SO MUCH more important to the socialist cause than a socialist senator who says the right thing.
PROOFS PROOFS PROOFS
(article coming out in 19th-Century Music next month)
Is *all* theater "hybrid" theater? My new review is up on H-France:
h-france.net/vol26reviews...
This could be an Emma Stone monologue in a Lanthimos movie. 🔥
Oo i have a story coming out that would be up your alley.
It's the listicle you've all been waiting for: @carolinefrmus.bsky.social ranks (almost) every piece by Darius Milhaud: van-magazine.com/mag/every-pi...
Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.
CALL FOR PITCHES
@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.
We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.
Details below!
halftime show fromt eh supebowl showing a set on the field featuring a nyc bodega
This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities.
An artist
youtu.be/YYlSa4M2zzM?...
“Perhaps what the score most resembles is a topographical map, with the arcs like a distant outcropping of mountains and the arrows at the bottom right bringing sketched-out directions to mind.”
@oliviagiovetti.bsky.social on political possibilities of graphic notation.
My new story "Mieszko" is up on Twin Flame Literary:
twinflameliterary.com/mieszko/
Where can you donate to MN anti-ICE protesters? Anyone know?
“Next Door seems created by AI, algorithmic and connected nowhere. The only Manhattan you get is from the bar.”
The problem with imperialism is that it violates borders while also enforcing them, like a snake shedding its skin while swallowing a mouse whole.
