Jay Harvey Upstage

Daniel J. Levitin I wonder if I've heard any one piece of music a thousand times, yet somehow I believed cognitive neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin when he said in a Butler University lecture Tuesday evening: "You can listen to a song a thousand times and still like it." The surprise in that statement is that our brains also favor being surprised by as well as familiar with input. So why would it be the case that a great number of repetitions (presumably not in succession!) of the same composition — an experience particularly available today when everything is recorded and widely accessible — doesn't turn us off? Levitin, author of the best-selling "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" (2006), offered a plausible answer to that question, though it is admittedly somewhat speculative. He said that it is likely that all music we've ever heard is stored somewhere in our brains. This would mean that the thousandth time he...

The pointillistic precision of yMusic  made a good impression in Sunday's concert. It's a pleasure to note that  Indianapolis was part of a musical coincidence Sunday: On the same night that Roomful of Teeth, an ensemble in which Caroline Shaw sings, was picking up a Grammy Award, Shaw's composition "From Rivers" received its second performance ever at Hilbert Circle Theatre. "From Rivers"  received its first performance at the opening of the Eskenazi Hospital in Indianapolis in December. On Sunday, Indianapolis-born vocal soloist Kristin "KO" Newborn joined the Indianapolis Children's Choir, accompanied by Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra associate principal cellist Perry Scott, in a performance keynoting a concert produced by New Amsterdam Records and presented by the ISO (but not featuring the orchestra). Caroline Shaw, winner of 2013 Pulitzer Prize Shaw's "From Rivers" contrasts the intensity of the solo voi...

Aping the ritualistic spear hoist of our ancestors, Kevin Burke is "Defending the Caveman." "Defending the Caveman" is a rare kind of marquee theater event to have splashed down at Theatre on the Square over the weekend for an indefinite run. Kevin Burke has been associated with Rob Becker's one-man, two-act show since 2003, principally at Harrah's Las Vegas, where he concluded a record-setting engagement last May. To see the Zionsville resident revive his interpretation amounted to an expert showcase of comic professionalism and timing, honed to a fare-thee-well but presented with just enough audience interaction to seem fresh. On a set representing a timeless cross between a modern home and prehistoric dwellings, with representations of cave paintings on large stone-like slabs in the background, the Caveman reviews the inevitable distance between male and female worldviews. Specifically, the way these differences keep bobbing to the surface in marr...

Typos are the gnats and horseflies of blogging.  Once detected they can easily be swatted away or squashed. Fresh swarms always hover nearby, but vigilance can forestall them, and those that get through the defenses can quickly be removed.  More indelible are typos in printed books. Everyone has found them, but as an inveterate reader of poetry books, I rarely see such smudges on their pages. This one is the most glaring I've ever come across: In The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini, the most famous poem of Richard Eberhart, "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment," is included. The original ends with this  poignant stanza: "Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill / Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall / But they are gone to early death, who late in school / Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl." As printed in this handsome book, however, the last word has become "paw." The anthology is nearly 20 years ...

(Written after wading through the hagiographic, overheated prose of SI's feature on Peyton Manning and somebody else's profile of Roger Federer after he won his quarterfinal match in Australia, but before he lost to Rafael Nadal in the semifinal. I've tried to represent the flavor of this perfervid sports journalism, though not the excessive length. But it is still too long, and thus a tribute to the underrated sport covered herein.) Peyton Manning Roger Federer The whispers had started, the knowing, dismissive nods, the shrinking sales of memorabilia. Rueful head-shakings, too, but only from the more compassionate fans. And those are not the dominant voices in the unforgiving universe of contemporary sports fanaticism. The old champ had got wind of the negative chatter, of course: Jay Harvey had to add to his struggle to get back into sleeping trim a ferocious battle to shake off and neutralize the naysayers. They'd heard all the unflattering stories, o...

The final scene of James Still's "And Then They Came for Me" at IRT. Some events that will always be worth careful study also need to be examined through other kinds of presentation. That's what "And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank" accomplishes in focusing dramatically on a few young persons' experience of the Nazi regime's systematic slaughter of European Jews in World War II. Indiana Repertory Theatre opened its third presentation (the other two were the 1996 premiere and 2005) of James Still 's multimedia play this weekend on the Upperstage. Still, the IRT's playwright in residence, effectively incorporates videotaped personal testimony from two Holocaust survivors in a dramatic presentation of their stories. Both of them briefly knew Anne Frank in Amsterdam after German armies had occupied the Netherlands. Thus, "And Then They Came for Me" is grounded in its links to the most famous Holocau...

Jennifer Christen performed Mozart's oboe concerto with ISO. No Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra first-chair player within memory have I so looked forward to hearing in a concerto as Jennifer Christen, the oboist hired as principal in 2012.  Acquaintance with her abilities was delayed somewhat by the lockout in the fall of that year, but there's been ample opportunity since to enjoy her floating, pristine sound in the many oboe solos that dot the symphonic repertoire. In this weekend's shortened shortened schedule (just the Coffee Concert Thursday and Friday evening's performance, reviewed here), Australian conductor Daniel Smith made his ISO debut as well. To savor the skills and artistry of two excellent musicians under 30 in the same concert was most heartening. But first, a consideration of Christen's performance of Mozart's Oboe Concerto in C major. With excellent support from Smith and her ISO colleagues, she gave a winning performance of a work a...