April 9th, 2015 Young Steve Jobs at his Woodside, California, home, 1982. I’ve written about the late Apple founder Steve Jobs opting to listen to vinyl over mp3s and CDs at home, even after inventing devices like the iPhone and iPod, which have revolutionized the way the people now consume their music. I just started […]
ACEI BLOG - MUSIC
Time Traveling with Music
February 26th, 2015 In just the past couple of weeks, here at ACEI, we have been suddenly blessed by a flow of credentials from individuals with degrees in music. Holders of these degrees are from all corners of the world and studied at conservatories and universities from Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Italy, South Korea, to Canada. […]
Rubén Blades’ “El Padre Antonio y Su Monaguillo Andrés”
February 12th, 2015 Grammy Award-winning Rubén Blades is a wonderfully gifted Panamanian poet and songwriter whose works often take on a political tinge. Raised in a progressive family, his grand-uncle was a revolutionary during the Cuban War of Independence against Spain. His mother was an actress, his father a musician, and the girls in his […]
Tinariwen, The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer
November 13th, 2014 Tinariwen’s Emmaar (2014) Tinariwen, The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer sounds like a gruesome scene from the Kel Tamashek uprising of 1963 in northern Mali that saw the death of messianic Tinarwen frontman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib’s parents when he was a small boy. But in fact, it’s actually the group’s playbill for […]
Walter Benjamin: Why Is Art Worth More Than Music?
August 21st, 2014 German Philosopher Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940 Walter Benjamin was a German philosopher (1892-1940) whose most famous work from 1936 was called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. You can read here. In his famous work, he discusses originality, authenticity, and mass production of art. He writes about the “aura” […]
RIP: Maya Angelou
June 26th, 2014 Last month we lost the great Maya Angelou. Our guest blogger, Tom Schnabel, had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Angelou in 1995 when he hosted the radio show Cafe LA at KCRW, the public station housed at Santa Monica College. We’d like to share Tom’s recent blog about having Dr. Angelou as […]
Russian Rock: Then and Now
May 23rd, 2014 I was Music Director of KCRW and host of Morning Becomes Eclectic during the 1980s and we did regular programs featuring the latest in Soviet-era Russian pop and rock music. Back then, the Cold War was alive and well, with Reagan and Brezhnev regularly rattling their swords. Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny once […]
Easter Island’s Only Concert Pianist
April 24th, 2014 Mahani Teave: Easter Island’s only classical pianist I recently saw a BBC feature by a Santiago-based correspondent on a young woman named Mahani Teave who is Easter Island’s only classical pianist. These are the type of stories I find truly inspiring. When you think of this remote and isolated South Pacific island, […]
World Music Teaches You Everything
April 3rd, 2014 Music tells the stories of our world I majored in Humanities as an undergraduate because it was broad-based and I could take many courses, from California Geography to Entomology to history, philosophy, languages and literature. Later, I took an MA in Comparative Literature for similar reasons: I could read the great writers […]
Love and Romance: Our 3 Favorites in Music, Literature, Art and Film
February 13th, 2014 Last year for Valentine’s Day we posted a blog on how different cultures and countries celebrate the day. This year, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I’ve invited three of my friends and contributors to ACEI’s AcademicExchange blog to chime in and share their most favorite romantic songs/musical compositions, literary creations, film and […]