What might be read on nights like this

This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
I didn't kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn't turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn't sleep
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me

Leonard Cohen


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David Munrow - more than early music

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'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
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Classical music must be doing something wrong

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Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...
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Soundtrack for a porn movie

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The act of killing from 20,000 feet

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Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

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EXECUTIVE SESSIONS OF THE SENATE PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS OF THE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS ========================= VOLUME 2 __________ EIGHTY-THIRD CONGRESS FIRST SESSION 1953 STATE DEPARTMENT TEACHER-STUDENT EXCHANGE PROGRAM [Editor's note.--The composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990), whose works included Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944 and an Academy Award in 1950. Because he had gone to Italy on a Fulbright scholarship in 1951, the subcommittee questioned him about his past political associations. His oral history, published as Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland, 1900 through 1942 (New York: St. Martin's, 1984), and Copland Since 1943 (New York: St. Martin's, 1989) acknowledged that he had been a ``fellow traveler'' in the 1930s because ``it seemed the thing to do at the time,'' but stated that he had never joined a political party. Fo...
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