Dartmouth College is one of the coolest educational institutions on the face of the earth, and it never ceases to amaze me. On January 15th, Philip Glass simply strolled into my Ethnomusicology class, holding a hot cup of coffee, and began speaking with us as if we were a group of old friends. Whenever he […]
“There is no way to the extracting of [the heart’s] hidden things save by the flint and steel of listening to music and singing, and there is no entrance to the heart save by the ante-chamber of the ears.”
Nasr, 1997
Sufi Muslims, who observe a mystical dimension of Islam, are renowned for their rich musical tradition. […]
In Where Rivers and Mountains Sing, Theodore Levin and Valentina Süzükei describe a musical technique called sound mimesis, the act of intentionally re-enacting and re-presenting a sound from our environment. Jean Sibelius’s tone poem, The Swan of Tuonela, is a musical depiction of a scene from the Kalevala epic of Finnish mythology. The scene takes […]