-
2 months ago | 
kwbu.org | David SMith |David Smith
Last week we talked about groundbreaking modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg who died in Los Angeles in 1951. In 1965, Schoenberg’s son established Belmont Music Publishers to manage his father’s publishing rights. He also kept an official repository of Schoenberg’s scores from which orchestras worldwide could rent or buy copies. It operated out of a building behind the family house. That house was in Pacific Palisades, California.
-
Jan 13, 2025 | 
kwbu.org | David SMith |David Smith
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time….” You may recognize that line from either the play Macbeth or more recently, it being quoted in the musical Hamilton. Shakespeare’s point, at least in part, is that we’re all a little bit older now than we were last week. Time has a way of doing that. We know too that our mental sharpness begins to lessen as those years fly past.
-
Dec 9, 2024 | 
kwbu.org | David SMith |David Smith
Newport, Rhode Island is the home of the U.S. Naval War College and my work with it takes me up there occasionally. Over the years it’s become one of my favorite little towns. I don’t think there’s any place more picturesque if you like the water. Back during the Gilded Age in the later 19th century, it was one of the very trendy summering spots for the super wealthy.
-
Nov 25, 2024 | 
kwbu.org | David SMith |David Smith
Here’s a question for you: Does knowing that a particular work of art was painted by a famous painter make you like it more? How much does the name on the canvas influence what you think of it? Or even how much you like it? Would you like “Girl with a Balance” less if it were suddenly discovered that it did not come from the hand of Vermeer but from a copycat? One of the hottest topics in the art world is the challenge of accurate attribution.
-
Nov 18, 2024 | 
kwbu.org | David SMith |David Smith
Last week we talked about the relationship of the old with the new, the past with the present, the relationship of history with today. I said that our interactions with art often contain this duality and how we approach art is sometimes like how we think about history.
-
Nov 11, 2024 | 
kwbu.org | David SMith |David Smith
I’m often asked how it happened that academic historian wound up doing a show about the arts. It’s a fair question. One of my answers (beyond just loving art) is that how we interact with art is similar to how we interact with history itself. It’s a similarity that helps us process both what we think of art and what we think of as traditional history—if we let it. In both, you have a past and a present that you have to deal with.
-
Nov 4, 2024 | 
kwbu.org | David SMith |David Smith
I asked one of my history students last week about what she thought separates history—as we study it and think about it—from art that has a historical setting. Natalie paused a second and then said “Evidence. Evidence and corroboration.” I liked that answer a lot. “You know that painting of Manifest Destiny,” she went on, “that shows the woman in white floating through the air stringing telegraph wire behind her and carrying a book?
-
Oct 28, 2024 | 
kwbu.org | David SMith |David Smith
The BBC calls it the most misunderstood Oscar winner ever. Amadeus, the dramatic, semi-biographical movie about the composer Mozart came out in 1984—40 years ago. It won 8 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Costumes, Best Sound, and Best Makeup. It’s one of my favorite movies—if not my very favorite. It was based on a 1979 play by Peter Shaffer with the same title.
-
Sep 30, 2024 | 
kwbu.org | David SMith |David Smith
Far more years ago than I care to remember, I was a senior in high school taking British literature. What I don’t really mind remembering from that class is the prologue to poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. I had to memorize the first 18 lines of it. The other morning driving to school my daughter told me that she was having to memorize a part of the prologue too. I was in equal turns shocked and pleased.
-
Sep 23, 2024 | 
kwbu.org | David SMith |David Smith
I’m working on writing another book right now, a follow up of sorts to my biography of US Admiral George Dewey. This one is about one of his contemporaries. I was having some trouble recently in one of the chapters. I had compiled 25 pages or so worth of notes, but they really didn’t strike me as much more than a pile of observations and loosely connected vignettes. I couldn’t figure out how to make them all fit together in a coherent form.
