by Daniel Hathaway
As the historian Barbara Tuchman revealed in her book A Distant Mirror, the 14th century in Europe was both eventful and full of contradictions.
On the traumatic side, the Great Famine and the bubonic plague claimed a great swath of the population, the Hundred Years’ War raged, and the papacy moved from Rome to Avignon in France, marking the beginning of the decline in influence of the Catholic Church.
On the positive side came the flowering of experiments in music, a subject that Debra Nagy and her Les Délices colleagues charmingly explored in their “14th Century Avant-garde” program on Saturday, November 23 at the Pivot Center on Cleveland’s West Side, a converted 1919 building once used for making ships’ sails and awnings. [Read more…]
It is one of Cleveland’s persistently good things that outlets for fresh new music — played by some of the area’s best musicians — continue to thrive. On Sunday, April 28, we were reminded of this again at Cleveland Chamber Collective’s presentation of Ty Alan Emerson’s 
Like many, composer Ty Alan Emerson watched the events of January 6, 2021 unfold on the national news. “Even though I wasn’t there, I felt that this was an attack on me, my belief in our Constitution, and our democracy,” Emerson said during a telephone conversation, adding that he “needed to do something.”