Chadwick Jenkins

About Chadwick Jenkins

Chadwick lives in New York City where he is finishing his dissertation 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

DVDs

The Technology of the Occult: Méliès and the Invention of Film

[19.Jun.08] :. Like any illusionist, Méliès created wonderment with only the slightest of pretense, creating a filmic language that continues to be explored and exploited today.

Recent features

 

Film

It’s Not Nice, It’s Art!

[12.Nov.07] :. In the film version of The Threepenny Opera, Pabst managed to accomplish what Brecht could not: a true reconciliation between the satiric jubilance of the original stage play and the politically driven cynicism of Brecht’s revision.

Recent features

 

Music

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: Vocal Lightning Captured in a Fragile Bottle

[31.Aug.07] :. Fischer-Dieskau's voice carries us to that primal, first speech, that musical utterance that communicates desire, represents passion, and attempts to eradicate the barriers that separate human beings.

Recent features

 

Theater

Henrik Ibsen: The Courage of the Loss of One’s Convictions

[17.Aug.07] :. This collection of Ibsen's plays is something of an event -- one that is not likely to be repeated anytime soon -- worthy of our attention and, perhaps, even our gratitude.

Recent features

 

Film

Spaghetti War Flicks: World War II Brought to Life, Sort of

[18.Jul.07] :. I love Spaghetti Westerns, even the not-so-great ones. I even like the bad dubbing.

Recent features

 

Visual Arts   The Master of Light and Shadow

Film   James Cagney: Another Look at Hollywood's Tough Guy

Film   An Unnamed Chapter

Featured Article

Film

Aronofsky: A Shockingly Talented and Aggressive Filmmaker

[12.Apr.07] :. Aside from being the early efforts of a shockingly talented and aggressive filmmaker, Requiem for a Dream and Π -- while relating quite different stories -- share an underlying narrative structure and a profound concern for the individual's deeply embedded need for the patterns that inform his/her life.

Recent features

 

DVDs   Lest We Should Forget

Culture   The Birth of an Idea: Instant Nation

Columns

Variations on a Theme

The Sounds of Now: Tristan Murail and Sounding Stasis

[2.Jul.08] :. What happens to the ear when it receives musical sound? Do we hear "our" music as music and the rest as noise?

Recent columns

 

Variations on a Theme

The Practicality of the Impossible: John Cage and the Freeman Etudes

[2.May.08] :. 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.

Recent columns

 

Variations on a Theme

Every Good Boy Does Fine

[21.Feb.08] :. 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.

Recent columns

 

Variations on a Theme

Restoring Intellectual Day

[17.Jan.08] :. 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.

Recent columns

 

Variations on a Theme

Schroeder's Dilemma: The Christmas Carol, as Lucy Likes It

[6.Dec.07] :. 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.

Recent columns

 

Variations on a Theme   The Bull of Phalaris, or the Ambiguity of Musical Violence

Variations on a Theme   The Sounds of Now: Steve Reich and the Transmogrification of the Banal

Variations on a Theme   The Profound Consolation: The Use of Bach's Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Part 4)

Variations on a Theme   On Lexus, Hairapy, and the Scherzo from Beethoven's Ninth (with a nod to Kubrick)

Variations on a Theme   Classical Radio Communities: Thoughts on Mediation

Variations on a Theme   Why Don't the Planets Speak?: An Inquiry Into Music and Language

Variations on a Theme   The Sounds of Now, Part Three: Anthony Braxton and the Ethics of Improvisation

Variations on a Theme   The Profound Consolation: The Use of Bach's Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Part 3)

Variations on a Theme   The Profound Consolation: The Use of Bach's Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Part 2)

Variations on a Theme   The Profound Consolation: The Use of Bach's Music in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Part 1)

Variations on a Theme   An Overheard Conversation Concerning Musical Taste

Variations on a Theme   The Sounds of Now, Part Two: Meredith Monk

Variations on a Theme   Melodic Patriotism: A Look at Some Lesser-Known Pieces for the Fourth of July

Variations on a Theme   The Devil's Music: Franz Liszt's Musical Representation of Mephistopheles

Variations on a Theme   Judging a Bach By Its Cover

Variations on a Theme   On the Necessity of Listening As Confrontation

Variations on a Theme   The Sounds of Now: Brian Ferneyhough

Variations on a Theme   Stop Playing with Your Ticket: An Investigation of Concert-going Practices

Variations on a Theme   Songs Without Words, or So They Say: A Meditation on Titles

Variations on a Theme   Out of Proportion: Understanding the Medieval Motet

Variations on a Theme   A Historicist Manifesto: Why Classical Matters

Reviews

DVDs

Jean-Luc Godard: 3-Disc Collector's Edition

[21.Mar.08] :. For all of pretense surrounding these films and their attempts to grapple with "big ideas", they are, ultimately, experiences that one must live through; they demand viewing and listening.

Recent DVD reviews

 
PopMatters Pick

Books

In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton

[7.Mar.08] :. This is a different story of the blues; it is the story of those people (primarily white men and women) who were in search of something that they believed the blues or some other form of secular and "primitive" African-American music communicated in an undiluted manner.

Recent Book reviews

 

Books

Modernism by Peter Gay

[1.Feb.08] :. Alas, this entire book amounts to a collection of blurbs on various artists that might easily have been gleaned from program notes, dust jackets, or the brief commentary one reads on museum walls next to paintings.

Recent Book reviews

 

DVDs

Grenadier Guards: Hands Across the Sea [DVD]

[9.Jan.08] :. Man's utter incapability of peaceful resolution to conflict and the pride we take in our capacity for killing each other – set to universally recognized music.

Recent DVD reviews

 

DVDs

Sawdust and Tinsel: Criterion Collection

[11.Dec.07] :. Couples in this film draw blood in order to feel the human warmth left behind by bruises.

Recent DVD reviews

 

Books   The Agnostic Reader

DVDs   Django Reinhardt: King of Jazz Guitar [DVD]

DVDs   The House on Skull Mountain / The Mephisto Waltz

DVDs   Verdi

DVDs   Harvest of Sorrow

DVDs   England, My England

DVDs   Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Pacifist, Nazi Resister (2003)

DVDs   Sam Moore: The Original Soul Man [DVD]

DVDs   Aristide and the Endless Revolution (2005)

DVDs   Seinfeld - Season 7

Books   Divas and Scholars by Philip Gossett

DVDs   The Bob Newhart Show: The Complete Third Season

DVDs   Danger Mouse: The Complete Seasons 5 & 6

DVDs   The Kids in the Hall: Complete Season 4

 
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