When a musician is woodshedding a passage of music, they’re trying to master that part by repeatedly practicing it in private, as if having retreated to do so in a woodshed, away from others who might be bothered by it. This is part of a...
In our earlier conversation about the term clam, which musicians use to refer to a “missed note” or “musical mistake,” Martha misspoke and said a similar term was used in rowing and sculling. Actually, as many listeners...
Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
Ian in Jacksonville, Florida, wonders about why musicians use the word clam to mean “a mistake” or “an egregious musical error,” as in There are a lot of clams in there or We need to practice where the clams are regarding a...
Author Nick Hornby is an ardent fan of both the novelist Charles Dickens and the musician Prince. In Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius (Bookshop|Amazon), Hornby shows that those two very different men actually had a lot in common...
Eels, orts, and Wordle! Sweden awarded its most prestigious literary award to a book about…eels. The Book of Eels reveals the mysterious life cycle of this sea creature and its significance for famous figures from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud. Plus...