Chadwick lives in New York City and teaches Music History and Theory at The City College of New York. He earned his doctorate in Musicology at Columbia University. He has given papers on topics ranging from 12th Century lament to Duke Ellington and early radio to the use of Wagner’s music in Bugs Bunny cartoons. He has published in scholarly journals on the music of John Cage, Richard Strauss, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He has taught courses on music history, the history of rock, and the history of jazz at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Columbia University
Features
Friday, February 5 2010
J.D. Salinger’s Seymour, a Eulogy
Seymour is the presence you are sure you encountered before the door shut and he was gone; in this way, Seymour (not Holden) becomes the emblem for Salinger himself.
Friday, January 8 2010
Pocket Protectors and Politics: Is (Stephen Jay Gould’s) Science Political?
Our biology granted us a faculty (rationality) that allows us, when desirable or necessary, to deny aspects of our biology.
Thursday, April 2 2009
The Aesthetics of Absorption: Truffaut’s ‘The 400 Blows’
In Truffaut, the camera works not to keep the viewer out of the constructed reality of the film but rather to draw the viewer into the artifice, to make the viewer complicit in its feigned reality
Monday, March 2 2009
John Cassavetes’ Faces: The Authenticity of Discomfort
The camera always gets too close in Cassavetes’ films. These aren’t close-ups; they are invasions of private space.
Tuesday, February 3 2009
Rossellini and the Filter of Neo-Realism
These films flaunt their artifice and yet there are moments when something else emerges -- some rarefied emotion that we connect to reality.
Columns
Wednesday, July 2 2008
The Sounds of Now: Tristan Murail and Sounding Stasis
What happens to the ear when it receives musical sound? Do we hear "our" music as music and the rest as noise?
Friday, May 2 2008
The Practicality of the Impossible: John Cage and the Freeman Etudes
John Cage replaces the comforting order of the cosmos with the recalcitrant, indecipherable organization of a part of the universe. Each sound, radically set off from the others, demands that we hear it in isolation.
Thursday, February 21 2008
Every Good Boy Does Fine
Required to take a music class in high school I signed up for chorus, but the teacher offered me $50 to drop the class – and other ruminations about learning to play the piano.
Thursday, January 17 2008
Restoring Intellectual Day
It rankles my sensibilities that great music is considered "timeless" and therefore Handel's music still "means" today whatever it was it meant in his own time.
Thursday, December 6 2007
Schroeder's Dilemma: The Christmas Carol, as Lucy Likes It
The Christmas carol is neither high art nor popular claptrap; it is neither austerely sacred nor tritely popular; it is both timeless and timely, traditional and modern.
Reviews
Friday, November 6 2009
The 39 Steps
In Hitchcock's world, we don't write the play; we just have to know when to act.
Wednesday, October 21 2009
The Tales of Hoffmann
This is perhaps the only filmed opera that one could view with the sound turned off and the viewer would still come away mesmerized.
Friday, October 16 2009
Throne of Blood
In Throne of Blood, Ambition appears as something outside of the human character that preys upon pride and contributes to the demise of the prideful.
Friday, October 9 2009
Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 by Chad Heap
If you want to understand race and sexuality in the United States, don't bother with policy -- look at entertainment!
Tuesday, October 6 2009
Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001, by Phillip E. Wegner
Wegner depicts this period in recent history as open to all possibilities, possibilities that come crashing down with the World Trade Center attacks and the subsequent War on Terror.
Blogs
Wednesday, December 2 2009
The Beatles on Record (videos)
A wonderfully produced documentary on the most important recorded legacy of popular music.
