Music

A national study documents what many congregations already knew—that the arts are good for faith, and faith can be good for the arts.

This collection has no reason to exist, except as a shameless exploitation of the Lennon-McCarney catalog.

Tag Evers 1-01-2001
It's 'Christian,' it's 'music'—but is it art?

Faith in the Lord. True love. Murderous violence. The Bible draws on these three themes. So does good country music. Think David, Bathsheba, and Uriah on compact disc.

Kimberly Burge 11-01-2000
Subtle details and weighty matters abound in Dar Williams' songs.
The infectious spirit of Tito Puente
Larry Bellinger 9-01-2000

Resistance Records recruits soldiers for 'racial holy war.'

I heard it in passing on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered one afternoon; it was a blurb for an upcoming story.

Family and community at the Bruce Springsteen show.

David Fillingim 3-01-2000
Ethics lessons from country music.
Tom Walsh 7-01-1999
David Wilcox's labor of love.

John Coltrane's quest for freedom.

Why Lucinda Williams Now? Maybe because it's time.

Rose Marie Berger 3-01-1999
Ancient music for the contemporary church
Susan Hogan/Albach 1-01-1999

Contemporary Christian music and its accent on celebrity

Scott Robinson 7-01-1998

Rita Dove is a woman who does not back down from unexplored territory. She is the youngest Poet Laureate in U.S. history; she is also the first African American to be so named. She is the author of several books of poetry, including The Darker Face of the Earth (1994), Mother Love: Poems (1995), and Museum (1997). Composer and free-lance writer Scott Robinson interviewed Dove while she was in Minneapolis preparing for a vocal performance with the Plymouth Music Series.

—The Editors

Let us honor the lost, the snatched, the relinquished,
those vanquished by glory, muted by shame.
Stand up in the silence they’ve left and listen:
those absent ones, unknown and unnamed—
remember!

—Rita Dove, from "Umoja—Each One of Us Counts"

‘‘I was very aware of the public nature of the piece," says Rita Dove of her poem "Umoja," "and I wanted it to have a certain majesty, and a certain pageantry." Commissioned for the Atlanta Centennial Cultural Olympics in 1996, and set to music by composer Alvin Singleton, "Umoja" is one of a number of Dove’s poems written for very public occasions.

A musician herself, Dove is keenly aware of the interplay of music and poetic word. But while poetry is most often a private undertaking, read by individuals in books or magazines, music-making is, by its nature, a public act. And Rita Dove, both in her enthusiasm for music and in her educational outreach—which emphasizes the music inherent in poetry itself—is a public kind of poet.

World music: The sound of the global village.
Bob Hulteen 5-01-1996

Huey Long taught us that "all politics is personal."

Michael Stipe 6-01-1994

R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe on political mockery.