Although some adults (my parents) don’t even know how to send text messages, it seems that the Finnish foreign minister, Ilkka Kanerva, has become quite the textpert.

Two bands performed at Terrace Club last Saturday night in an unusual show.

The Princeton Glee Club has been around since 1874, and it shows. This past weekend, while students flocked to productions such as “Clue” (the Musical?!) and “Arabian Nights,” the Glee Club performed Felix Mendelssohn’s epic oratorio, Elijah, in Richardson Auditorium, to an audience of senior citizens and music majors.

A selection of articles (in progress) by Russell O'Rourke.

It is a shame that most performers (or perhaps concert organizers) don’t have the courage to end a program with Bartók, instead opting for the Romantic route. With the Takács at the helm of the evening, however, the audience was willing to go wherever they took us.

Things I Discovered in Princeton, Episode I

Classical composers usually improve as they age. Beethoven reached dizzying heights during his late period; his last few symphonies and string quartets, intensely personal meditations on human nature and God, radically altered the way composers thought about form and harmony. Stravinsky, whose upward trajectory is harder to trace, given his restless desire to explore different musical territories, produced some of his most intricately beautiful works during old age. Late periods are usually marked by mastery and introspection.

Platitudes undercut any sense of character development. An eight-page denouement covers a shabby and stale period of mourning: grief washes over in a quick bout of puffy eyes, then all move on. Perhaps Ms. Jacobs will flesh out the wounds of loss in her sequel, “Knit Two,” arriving November 25, but I recommend that she stick to the camaraderie of social knitting.

Morton Feldman was, it could be fairly said, the twentieth century’s most talkative composer.

There are, I believe, four ways to approach the new film, “The Fourth Kind.” These four approaches are derived from J. Allen Hynek’s system of classification for alien encounters. According to Hynek, THE FIRST KIND is the sighting of a UFO (unidentified flying object). THE SECOND KIND refers to ...

Whenever people ask me, “What do Andy Samberg and Beethoven have in common?” I usually point to the obvious: “They both have big hair” or, “they both lived in different centuries.” The comedian and the composer both sport unwieldy manes of brown curls, lending them an air of frazzled genius ...