The Decade Revisited

This weekend, Studio 360 broadcasts its special time travel show, recorded in front of a live audience at WNYC’s Jerome L. Greene Performance Space.  And with this decade coming to an end, it seems like a good opportunity to revisit some of the events and trends from the 2000′s that we’ll always remember. *** GOING [...]

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Waiting for 2010

As the New Year closes in and we all take a little time for reflection, I can’t help but wonder what I’ll be doing at the close of the next decade — and the next, and the next…  I get solace and inspiration from a “Studio 360″ episode from last February which featured several older  [...]

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Poetic Recycling

With the new decade fast-approaching, I can’t help but think about reinvention. Studio 360 has done several segments that take dusty old ideas and wipe them clean with poetry. Recycling them into verse can reveal surprises. Here are some of my favorites. Susan B.A. Somers-Willet created poems based on the impoverished mothers of Troy, Michigan. [...]

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360 Staff Pick: Byrne Country

White Bone Country Andrew Byrne Composer Andrew Byrne spends most of his time in the U.S., but White Bone Country is about the ferocious, almost abstract deserts of his native Australia.  The instrumentation of piano and percussion sounds austere, but — played by crack musicians Stephen Gosling and David Shively — the result is a [...]

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At the Sound of the Beep

(flickr user pfv)   Studio 360 has had many memorable segments this year, but my favorite has to be from the show that aired the week of Barack Obama’s inauguration. “Are You There, Barack?  It’s Me, Artist” is a quirky, wonderful cross-section of Americans expressing their sincere hopes for (and from) the new president in [...]

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A Sip of Sherlock

This week, Studio 360 follows the ever-evolving Sherlock Holmes, who jumps off the pages of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle into the modern world as children’s lit’s Encyclopedia Brown and TV’s Dr. House. To get in the Holmes mood, I listened to hours of the 1940s radio drama, New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. After each episode, [...]

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Sounds Like Forever

At this point, just two days before Christmas, you’re probably waking up at odd hours with “O Little Town of Bethlehem” playing on that radio station inside your head.  Some songs never seem to go away.  And then there are those that really don’t. This month, “Studio 360” has been featuring some of this year’s [...]

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Off With “The Sing-Off”

It turns out that Fox’s hit musical comedy “Glee” was primetime TV’s gateway drug to a cappella.  NBC’s “The Sing-Off” ended last night.  Kudos to the winners aside (congrats to Nota), if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from a week of this show, it’s that matching fluorescent outfits and coordinated dance moves do no [...]

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There Arose Such a Clatter

When I first talked to Phil Kline about his boombox Christmas carol “Unsilent Night” (for a Village Voice article in 2002), I went in assuming that Kline was Jewish. Nothing weird about that, I figured; “White Christmas” is by Irving Berlin. Wrong. Kline was raised by devout Christians in Pennsylvania. Still, he rejected the idea [...]

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Survey Says…

Did you miss that performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the arts center last month? Or the oboe concerto recital at the concert hall? Well it looks like you weren’t the only one. Last week, a new report from the National Endowment for the Arts presented a rather grim picture of the state of [...]

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