MUSIC FOR PAINTERS: Music as a protective bubble for focus
After decades of work pioneered by great minds like Daniel Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession), Ol...
Performing Arts
VOICE OF THE EAGLE—THE ENIGMA OF ROBBIE BASHO: A film about a legendary musician premieres in San Francisco
View from the front of San Francisco's Roxie TheaterThe amazing thing, said many of the people interviewed in the documentary movie Voice of the Eagle: The...
THE LAST HURRAH: The Tragically Hip’s “final tour” after frontman Downie’s cancer diagnosis
The following has been excerpted from What Is Hip? The Life and Times of The Tragically Hip by Marc Shapiro, which tells the story of the renowned Canadian rock...
BHAKTI AND THE GREAT AMERICAN SONGBOOK: How music and spirituality are connected by Love
Musical beginnings
When I was a boy, my idea of great music and literature was South Pacific and the other Broadway shows of Rodgers and Hammerstein.Later, as...
MUSIC, MOOD, AND MINDFULNESS: How music works its magic on us
Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier (24)” streams at 29 percent volume while I write this. My go-to writing music, Baroque, floats wave-like above and below my consci...
DOWNTON ABBEY AND SPIRITUAL VALUES: Same truths, both upstairs and downstairs
My wife and I just finished watching the final episode of Downton Abbey, the "Masterpiece" TV drama about life in an English country manor circa 1920, which beg...
REDISCOVERING SACRED CREATIVITY: How artists help create a more healthy, inspired and connected world
Bass frequencies from a massive sound system pulse in my body and seem to shake the concrete walls of a cavernous warehouse somewhere in Brooklyn. There's a gro...
ACTING FOR SELF-REFLECTION: Q&A with actor and mindfulness practitioner Binh Doan
There's a lot more going on in acting than you might think. Just ask French actor and Plum Village mindfulness practitioner Binh Doan. Though he's rather...
THE MAGIC OF MUSIC: How the balance of tension and release in music affects our appreciation of it
I don’t know the name of the selection or the pianist performing it. When the simple jazz improvisation came over my radio one afternoon, almost instinctively I...