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"Music opens a path into the realm of silence.” How Bach Will Save Your Soul: German Philosopher Josef Pieper on the Hidden Source of Music’s Supreme Power "Some of humanity’s greatest and most fertile minds — including Oliver Sacks, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Aldous Huxley, and Friedrich Nietzsche — have contemplated the power of music, and yet the question of why music moves us so remains unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable. Why is it that music can permeate our deepest memories, help us grieve, and save our lives? Four years after his increasingly timely case for shedding the culture-crushing shackles of workaholism, the German philosopher Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904–November 6, 1997) explored the abiding puzzlement of music’s power in a speech delivered during intermission at a Bach concert in 1952, later published under the title 'Thoughts About Music' in his small, enormous posthumous essay collection Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation — a set of reflections titled after Augustine’s beautiful assertion that 'only he who loves can sing' (which Van Gogh echoed in his insistence that art and love are one), exploring what Pieper argues is the 'hidden root' of the richness of all music, fine art, and poetry: contemplation." Read the article here.

Washington Post Going Out Guide review of Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words. Coming to a theatre near you.

Jimmy Herring will be in-town, Jimmy Herring & Invisible Whip, this Sunday. My wife says, Okay, lets go! This is an older recording I admit, the only "Dead"in my library, nevertheless looking forward to Mr. Herring.

Meet the scientist who turns data into music—and listen to the sound of a neutron star From stock trends to changes in Earth’s temperature, data that vary over time are usually represented in graphs and charts. How boring! What if, instead, one could listen to the sudden drop of a stock price or the steady increase of global temperatures? Enter sonification, the process of transforming flat data into mellow soundwaves. Mark Ballora, an expert on music technology at Pennsylvania State University in State College, uses sonification to create symphonies out of scientific data. Raised in the 1960s just outside San Francisco, California, by an architect and a pianist, Ballora lived and breathed music, playing piano, listening to Beatles records, and attending Grateful Dead gigs. For the past 20 years, he has collaborated with dozens of scientists to turn all kinds of data into music, from the energy emitted by a neutron star to the body temperature cycle of arctic squirrels. More here.