Chris Walton ❌👑

First time seeing the northern lights, from the Boston suburbs!

Joby Talbot - Hovercraft Listen to Hovercraft on TIDAL

Whenever a 21st-century composition pops up on GBH radio, my ears perk up. Joby Talbot's "Hovercraft" came on while I was driving my kid to a Tufts Youth Philharmonic rehearsal last week, so now we've each wandered down our own Talbot rabbit hole! @crbclassical.bsky.social tidal.com/track/140922...

Whoa

Photo shows a small wooden literature rack attached to a pillar holding two volumes with gilded lettering, a blue hardcover edition of “The Constitution of the United States of America” and a green hardcover edition of “The Bill of Rights.”

Excellent literature rack in a coffee shop in Middletown CT

Prayers plus the best toy of all time: blue ribbon!

Ooh! Thank you!

🎻🪗 Electric (but all-acoustic) show by the New England contra dance pros Pine Tree Flyers, touring the east coast this month. Check them out: www.pinetreeflyers.com

🎶 Finally made it to a Boston Community Chamber Music open mic night at Somerville Music Spaces. On the program: quartet by Korngold; Paganini on two violins; arrangements of Telemann, Busoni, and Bartok for bassoon; and Bach on piano. Great org! bostonccm.org

Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider loves music so much, she might just eat it Snider's supercharged relationship with her art form and open-book stance on depression and anxiety shine through in her new opera, which debuts this week in Los Angeles.

Great interview with composer Sarah Kirkland Snider about her new Hildegard opera, "music written in the cracks" between pop and classical, the New Amsterdam label, and migraines and mental health. I hope I get to hear her opera someday!

In Game 7, Dodgers, Blue Jays deliver fitting finale to World Series that had ‘everything’ Digesting the moments, memories and history lessons from a Game 7 — and World Series — that kept us riveted from start to finish.

To recap the amazingness: www.nytimes.com/athletic/677...

🎶 Today’s concert outing: marvelous chamber music by Mozart performed by the Boston Symphony Chamber Players with guest pianist Inon Barnatan.

What an intense, compelling World Series. Wow.

Tonight’s concert outing: the fantastic Québécois band Le Vent du Nord at the Somerville Theatre!

Stayed in the car last night after we arrived home just to let the kids listen to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" for their first time, on a WERS Halloween special.

Can you make an automated Bluesky account more annoying with each new post?

Never has there been a better or more loved cat toy than this blue ribbon. He expects me to play a ferocious game of ribbon with him multiple times a day. 😸

Far Away / In the West New work for solo piano, performed in Distler Hall by John McDonald at the October 24, 2025, Tufts Composers New at Noon concert

🎶 Here's a recording of my new composition for piano, "Far Away / In the West," written for the Tufts Composers New at Noon concert "Sonic Geo-Detection: Recovering Time and Place." Thanks to John McDonald for the lovely performance! soundcloud.com/philocrites/...

Works by Nubia Melina Jaime Donjuan and Abraham Gomez (world premiere!) plus arrangements by bassoonist Natalie Zemba of works by Diana Syrse and Arturo Márquez. Lively, colorful program!

Concert program: Menotomy Concert Series Presents Kalliope Reed Quintet Música de México y Memorias Anna Bradford, oboe Céline Ferro, clarinet Bennett Parsons, saxophone Bill Kirkly, bass clarinet Natalie Zemba, bassoon Friday, October 24, 2025, 7:30pm Arlington Town Hall

🎶 I can’t pass up Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” and here it joins a program of recent pieces by Mexican composers, arranged for the Kalliope Reed Quintet!

🎶 Streaming concert: At noon ET today, the Tufts Composers New at Noon series resumes, with a lot of us contributing to the theme "Sonic Geo-Detection: Recovering Time and Place." Bonus: Hear mechanical engineering PhD student Leon Li, who is a harmonica virtuoso and expert instrument builder!

Adventures in poorly targeted marketing: I got a postcard today—addressed to me “or current resident”—asking if I could be the next rector of an Episcopal church. “Could” is doing a LOT of work in that sentence…

I returned to the site of the original "No Kings" protest A letter from Lexington’s Battle Green.

You could plausibly say the No Kings movement started in Lexington in 1775, so it was a great pleasure to be on the Battle Green today with thousands upon thousands of good people unafraid of the fight ahead
www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Thank you!

Bill McKibben was final speaker at Lexington MA #NoKings rally. He recalled growing up in town & leading tours of the battle green. He described the mass arrest there of 400+ anti-Vietnam War protesters including his father when he was 10. Stand up together, he urged; we must rise to the occasion.

U.S. Senator Ed Markey celebrates Massachusetts’s democratic history and urges the crowd in Lexington to keep fighting for everyone’s rights

Massachusetts Poet Laureate Regie O’Hare Gibson speaks at the Lexington MA #NoKings rally

(I didn’t remember to jot down the names of speakers I didn’t know.)

A Palestinian American professor talked about the opportunities and the challenges her family has faced in the U.S. and was one of several speakers to honor Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was kidnapped and held by ICE for weeks for co-authoring an op-ed supporting calls for Palestinian rights

As one woman speaks at the podium, two others stand to the side dressed in historical outfits and holding tasseled banners: a purple banner fringed with gold says “Lexington” in large letters near the date 1887, with the phrase “Something Must Be Done” below; the phrase is a quote from a Lexington woman who gathered other women to push for women’s rights in the early 19th century. The second banner says “Protest is patriotic.”

Speakers celebrated historical figures active in multiple movements to expand American democracy who lived in Lexington; here a speaker and two costumed women honor the long path to women’s suffrage

A man and a woman stand behind a podium with a “No King! No Tyranny!” sign in front of a large crowd. The woman is speaking into a microphone.

Speakers at the Lexington MA #NoKings rally included the organizers (shown here) of the weekly protests outside the Burlington ICE building and a leader of the ACLU