During this increasingly digital age, instant gratification is something we are starting to take for granted. It’s becoming easier and easier to get our hands on any sort of media we want with the click of a button or the touch of a screen. CDs are bought more for their nostalgic value than for the music they hold; when the Internet has made it so simple to instantly listen to newly released music, it’s often unnecessary to pay for music at all, let alone purchase physical copies of it.
I’m very excited for the Amherst College Orchestra’s upcoming season, because they’re playing two of the greatest pieces of music ever written: Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Mahler’s 5th Symphony. Of these two, you’ve probably only heard the former. While the latter is one of Mahler’s better-known works, it is still quite obscure in comparison to Beethoven’s 5th. I want to convince you to not only go to the concert featuring Mahler’s 5th, but also to go prepared.
In mid-July of this year, rising R&B artist Frank Ocean released his new album “Channel Orange.”
This weekend, the Amherst Symphony Orchestra embarks on a seemingly herculean task, a series of 5th symphonies including those of Beethoven, Schubert, Mahler and Shostakovich. These are some of the most well known, loved and studied pieces for any orchestra to tackle, making for an exciting and substantial season. With so much attention given to these works, it is a brave undertaking.
Although the Las Vegas-based band Imagine Dragons has been around since 2008, they’ve only recently become a part of the world of mainstream music. Imagine Dragons is comprised of four people: front man and songwriter Dan Reynolds, guitarist Wayne Sermon, bassist Ben McKee and drummer Daniel Platzman. The band had actually originally considered a different band name, but chose to name the band “Imagine Dragons” as an anagram of the original idea, which, to this day, they still have not revealed.
Last Thursday, I took a trip to Holyoke, MA with my girlfriend to Mountain Park to see the first tour show of Ben Folds Five, which has recently reunited to record a new album entitled “The Sound of the Life of the Mind,” which came out yesterday. This was especially exciting, as it was the first show that Ben Folds Five had done (save a one-time performance in 2008) since the 90s.
A Short History of Ben Folds Five
The summer of 2012 was a shockingly good few months for rock music, or at least I thought it was when I began compiling which albums stuck with me from this summer. I still stand by that assessment, to a degree, especially when it comes to long-established acts absent until they suddenly decided to kick themselves back into shape after years of painfully drawn-out new-release schedules.
