Music & Culture

Classical Music Posts

Reeder’s Movie Reviews: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Steve Reeder June 6, 2023

Welcome back to the Multiverse. If the most recent Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once, stoked your interest in compelling alternate realities, then the latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe merits your attention, too. This movie has intelligence, humor, relatable themes and dazzlingly crafted animation.

Tamara and Neil Caulkins are partners in music and life. They realized composer Martin Kennedy's composition, meant to honor the geologic majesty of Dry Falls. Photo courtesy of Tamara Caulkins.

New guitar composition evokes formation of the Grand Coulee

Lauren Gallup June 6, 2023

The Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington couldn’t be further away from waterfront property. But at the end of the last ice age, the area was, at times, underwater. Torrential flooding cascaded through the area and created the current landscape, including the Grand Coulee.
Some 15,000 years later, that geological gravitas has inspired a composition for guitars.

The DIVA Jazz Orchestra performers stand under red lights behind podiums with the bright yellow, green, blue and red title letters of their group emblazoned on the front. The lead performers are a group of women all wearing black tops and playing jazz band instruments.

More Than Music: The Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival

Thom Kokenge May 18, 2023

The Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival (LHJF) is a jewel among the rolling Palouse hills. Held for 56 years at the University of Idaho in Moscow, this festival has gathered on stage such luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, and the man of note, Lionel Hampton, who has the U of I School of Music named in his honor. This festival is a grand event that brings together jazz greats and students to create something unique.

Runners wearing water bottle backpacks, hats, headbands, headphones, and long sleeves walk toward finish line and smile toward the camera.

Badger Mountain Challenge: A unique running community, a changing landscape

Annie Warren May 3, 2023

Badger Mountain Challenge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQTyTxkMOS0&list=PL6pHcbVJ2q0GlWFInFMhze7AALPhxA-zs&index=42The annual Badger Mountain Challenge brings together an extraordinary community of people who celebrate running and support each other on this unique, treasured and threatened ultramarathon course

Maps by Christina Vega is the third edition of Vega's poetry collection, first published in 2017. Photo courtesy of Blue Cactus Press.

Pacific Northwest poet revisits social injustices

Lauren Gallup April 27, 2023

Five years since it was first published, Maps, a collection of poems by Tacoma writer Christina Vega, is still relevant today as a response to social injustice, they said.
“I’m asking readers to return to the work,” Vega said. “Let’s look at it again, these issues are still here.”