This weekend we observe the tenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. This is the best music written about it so far. John Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the first anniversary of 9/11, and blends the names and descriptions of victims in a mixing of choral, orchestral, [...]

Not long ago on the always interesting and uber-nerdy Language Log, Mark Liberman directed readers’ attention to a recent paper supposedly studying what gives music its emotional resonance (Daniel L. Bowling et al., “Major and minor music compared to excited and subdued speech“, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 127(1): 491–503, January 2010). They [...]