“What is music? There’s no end to the parade of philoso­phers who have won­dered about this, but most of us feel con­fi­dent say­ing: ‘I know it when I hear it.’ Still, judg­ments of musi­cal­ity are noto­ri­ously mal­leable. That new club tune, obnox­ious at first, might become toe-tappingly like­able after a few hear­ings. Put the most music-apathetic indi­vid­ual in a house­hold where some­one is rehears­ing for a con­tem­po­rary music recital and they will leave whistling Ligeti. The sim­ple act of rep­e­ti­tion can serve as a quasi-magical agent of musi­cal­i­sa­tion. Instead of ask­ing: ‘What is music?’ we might have an eas­ier time ask­ing: ‘What do we hear as music?’ And a remark­ably large part of the answer appears to be: ‘I know it when I hear it again.’”

For the full story, please see aeon.

“Pete Seeger, the singer, folk-song col­lec­tor and song­writer who spear­headed an Amer­i­can folk revival and spent a long career cham­pi­oning folk music as both a vital her­itage and a cat­a­lyst for social change, died on Mon­day in Man­hat­tan. He was 94.”

Read about Seeger’s life in The New York Times.

“Fifty years ago, the gov­er­nor of Indi­ana banned the Kingsmen’s Louie Louie for being obscene. The FBI then spent two years inves­ti­gat­ing its lyrics, cement­ing the song’s rep­u­ta­tion as rock’s ulti­mate rebel anthem, recorded by every­one from the Stooges to the Clash”

Read the full story at The Guardian.

“The goal of the New York Philharmonic’s dig­i­tal archives is to make avail­able all of the organization’s his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments. Because cre­at­ing such a com­pre­hen­sive resource is no small task—the orches­tra began oper­a­tions in 1842—the phil­har­monic opted to start with a por­tion of its materials—specifically those from what the Web site labels the Inter­na­tional Era (span­ning 1942 to 1970). Dur­ing this time the orches­tra took its place as a pre­mier ensem­ble in the world, just as the United States became a world power. It might be more apt to call this the Leonard Bern­stein era since the chronol­ogy neatly book­ends his debut with the group (in 1942) and his retire­ment as music direc­tor (in 1969). Of the more than 24,000 doc­u­ments cur­rently avail­able, almost 4,000 are asso­ci­ated with Bern­stein; this is con­sid­er­ably more than the 1,177 linked with Bernstein’s col­league Andre Koste­lan­etz, the con­duc­tor of the philharmonic’s pop­u­lar con­certs. For schol­ars who study Bern­stein, then, this site pro­vides an invalu­able look at pri­mary mate­ri­als, although those who are more gen­er­ally inter­ested in the orchestra’s his­tory will also find it worthwhile.”

For the full story, please see the Jour­nal of Amer­i­can His­tory.