Tag: music

Go see Tafelmusik’s The Galileo Project…

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns
December 1, 2012
3 mins to read
Leave comment

…if you have the opportunity. We did, last night, and were blown away. The music, the playing, the images, and the text were all fantastic, and pretty much exactly in line with the things that interest me most: science and the arts, mingled together. Tafelmusik is, of course, one of the world’s premiere period-instrument orchestras. …

Saturday Special from the Vaults: Intro and Chapter 1 of Johnny Cash: The Man in Black

By Edward Willett in Blog
May 5, 2012
18 mins to read
Leave comment

I’ve posted the openings to my Enslow biographies of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix–guess it’s time to give Johnny Cash his due. I enjoyed writing about Johnny Cash because a) he was a really interesting guy and b) I grew up listening to him. My folks liked country music, and Cash was one of their …

Saturday Special from the Vaults: Janis Joplin: Take Another Little Piece of My Heart

By Edward Willett in Blog, Books, The Vaults
April 7, 2012
18 mins to read
Leave comment

Another Enslow book, Janis Joplin: Take Another Little Piece of My Heart tells the story of another ’60s rock star who died at age 27–within just a few weeks of Jimi Hendrix’s death. Since I also wrote biographies of Johnny Cash and Andy Warhol for Enslow, I spent several months kind of stuck in the …

Predicting hits

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
June 14, 2011
4 mins to read
Leave comment

In my 1999 young adult science fiction novel Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star, I postulated a future in which the hit-making machinery of the music industry has become a science, where computers are able to determine what songs, and what singers, are sure to be the next big thing. In the book, a kid names …

Visualizing musical vibrations

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
June 1, 2011
5 mins to read
Leave comment

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/05/Visualizing-Musical-Vibrations.mp3[/podcast] As the classic Disney animated film Fantasia opens, a symphony orchestra starts to play, and the music emerging from the instruments becomes visible as blasts of color and dancing shapes. In real life, alas, music is primarily an auditory rather than visual experience. Although there is certainly interest to be had in watching a …

Steamed-Rice Mommy’s Coming to Town

By Edward Willett in Blog
February 16, 2011
1 mins to read
Leave comment

While looking for something entirely different in my computer files (The Mixed-Up Files of Edward C. Willett, which would be a great title for a book if someone hadn’t already kind of gotten there first), I came across this audio recording from a couple of years ago, when my daughter was seven. Ladies and gentlemen, …

Biddle-dee-diddle-dee-dee!

By Edward Willett in Blog
February 8, 2011
5 mins to read
Leave comment

Well, that was fun. By “that,” I mean the process of getting this new computer up and running to my satisfaction. Yes, the new monitor arrived last week, and I spent a few happy (well, mostly happy) hours with plug-ins and cables and drives (oh, my!), losing hours of productivity in order to get a …

Me, singing “Me”

By Edward Willett in Blog
January 30, 2011
1 mins to read
1 comments

While setting up my video last week for the virtual classroom visits-by-authors I was part of, I had the urge to give my microphone a good test by singing. So I recorded one of my party pieces, “Me” from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. The result pleased me enough I decided to YouTube it…and here …

Audiobook of Jimi Hendrix: Kiss the Sky now available

By Edward Willett in Blog
July 22, 2010
2 mins to read
4 comments

I had a nice surprise in the mail today: the audiobook version of my children’s biography of Jimi Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix: Kiss the Sky. The book was published by Enslow Publishers; the audibook was created by Recorded Books. Narrator Ezra Knight does an absolutely fabulous job, not surprising considering what an accomplished actor he is. …

Things I Found in My Mother-in-Law’s House (but I actually put there myself): The Army Song Book

By Edward Willett in Blog
June 10, 2010
5 mins to read
1 comments

OK, this is a rather odd entry in this series because, although it dates from 1941 (pretty much the same time as the paperbacks I blogged about previously), this book was not actually found in my mother-in-law’s house: it was actually found in my mother’s house, because it belonged to my father, James Willett (whose …

The scientific case for live music

By Edward Willett in Blog
January 7, 2010
4 mins to read
1 comments

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/01/The-Scientific-Case-for-Live-Music.mp3[/podcast] Music today is ubiquitous, both in public spaces like malls, elevators and offices and in the very private space between an individual’s ears, courtesy of personal music players. But that’s all recorded music. Live music remains far rarer. Live musicians may occasionally show up in a public space, but you generally have to seek …

My preview of this weekend’s South Saskatchewan Youth Orchestra Christmas brunch…

By Edward Willett in Art Columns, Blog
December 10, 2009
1 mins to read
Leave comment

…is in today’s Leader Post. It begins: What could be better than a wonderful Christmas brunch onstage at the Conexus Arts Centre? How about a wonderful Christmas brunch followed by a performance by the South Saskatchewan Youth Orchestra? That’s exactly the hard-to-imagine-a-better-than event scheduled for this Sunday. A silent auction and food kick off the …