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The Story Of 9/11's First Victim

September 11, 2013 - 1:17pm

Danny Lewin had a remarkable, but brief and largely unkown life. A mathematical genius, he invented Akamai Technologies and became a billionaire almost overnight. It was his technology that news and government sites relied on in the days after 9/11 when phone communication failed and web traffic surged. Ironically, he was also almost certainly the first victim on 9/11, stabbed to death while trying to overpower the terrorists that would eventually fly American Flight 11 into the World Trade Center.

A Polite Reply

September 10, 2013 - 11:30am

Although Hector Berlioz was capable of stinging irony, when he received a pointed letter from Richard Wagner, his reply was the essence of graciousness. On September 10, 1855, he wrote from Paris to Wagner in Switzerland: Your letter gave me great pleasure. You’re quite right to deplore my ignorance of...

Free Spirits

September 9, 2013 - 11:30am

In 1904 nineteen-year-old Alban Berg entered the Austrian civil service as an accountant, keeping tabs on the sale of pigs and the productivity of distilleries, but he was most devoted to classes in music theory taught by the innovative Arnold Schoenberg. Like Berg, Schoenberg had been forced by poverty to...

Pure Persistence

September 8, 2013 - 11:00am

For music, it was the worst of times. In September 1940, as German planes began bombing London, the main thing on everyone’s minds was survival, and yet an important part of surviving was music. At Queen’s Hall, after audiences for several performances were kept away by alerts that ran far...

Pure Persistence

September 8, 2013 - 11:00am

The Mystery Remains

September 7, 2013 - 11:00am

Polish piano virtuoso Leopold Godowsky had disappeared. On September 4, 1915, Godowsky left his home in Avon, New Jersey, telling his wife, Frieda, that he was going to New York to deposit $1000 in the bank. When he failed to come home, Frieda contacted the police, who determined that Godowsky...

Missing!

September 6, 2013 - 11:00am

On September 4, 1915, a New York Times headline broke the story: Godowsky Missing. And so began one of the strangest disappearances in music history. The celebrated Polish pianist Leopold Godowsky had been working at a fever pitch to complete a set of thirty piano adaptations for the Arts Publication...

Smoke Filled Rooms

September 5, 2013 - 11:00am

Although he wrote a sublime German Requiem , Johannes Brahms knew all about the earthly–and earthy--side of music. Brahms grew up in Hamburg in the 1840s in a family so poor that he had to go to work at the age of thirteen. Because he had remarkable talent, young Brahms...

'The New Yorker' Writer Asks 'Why Teach English?'

September 4, 2013 - 2:00am

Writer Adam Gopnik, in a recent piece for The New Yorker magazine, tackled the question, “Why teach English?”

College graduation statistics have been showing a steady decrease in English majors in recent years, and Gopnik said he fears the major is vanishing from American colleges and universities just as the Latin prerequisite vanished before it.

In response to this decline, he said people have been clamoring to make their case to save the study, with most defenses falling into two categories: One that argues English majors make better people and the second that they make for better societies.

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Excuses

September 3, 2013 - 11:00am

In 1886 American composer Horatio Parker had been hoping for a performance of his string quartet by an important Boston ensemble. When the performance fell through, his colleague George Whitefield Chadwick wrote a cheerful letter explaining what had gone wrong: In the first place, Kneisel gave me an excuse for...