Kenny Neal can’t say for sure which was the first instrument he ever played. It seems to him he’s always been a musician — growing up in Baton Rouge, La., […]
Music
DANCE
The Motion of Erosion
Choreographer Michael Spencer Phillips makes the sand a stage
In the golden evening light at Race Point Beach, an audience assembled on towels and blankets. Nearby, a group of dancers in white swayed gently back and forth, stretching and […]
PORTUGUESE FESTIVAL
Singing With Love
Fadista Celia Maria returns to Provincetown Town Hall for an increasingly rare ritual
At her home in South Dartmouth, Celia Maria recalls the fado singers who have inspired her. She opens the doors to her media center to reveal hundreds of LPs, 45s, […]
BOW AND BRUSH
A New Music Series Aims to Bridge Mediums
The Outer Cape Chamber Music Festival begins as a conversation between classical music and visual art
The Outer Cape, weathered and romanced by the Atlantic and bathed in a certain extraordinary light, has long inspired visual artists. Their work is all around us. What would happen, […]
JAMBALAYA
A Musician Conjures a Story for the Soul
David Eure makes his violin squeal, bark, thump, and sing
When David Eure plays his violin, its fingerboard dusted with rosin, he’s constructing a masterpiece of texture and inflection. In performance, he says, “Your audience is your canvas, and you’re […]
MUSIC
Indie Playlist: Outer Cape Summer Edition
Music to get excited about during the best time of the year
Few places in the world have as high a residents-and-visitors-to-musical-performers ratio as does the Outer Cape between Memorial Day and Labor Day. But how best to plan your schedule with […]
ROCK AND SOUL
Lisa Fischer’s Buffet of Sound
The former backup singer will take center stage at Provincetown Town Hall with Grand Baton
When Lisa Fischer was growing up in Brooklyn, she was “like a sponge,” she says, “soaking up whatever syrup was around.” The syrup was music. Her grandparents listened to jazz […]
REWILDING
Seth Glier Hears ‘a Symphony of Little Things’
His album Everything is in praise of wandering the wild
Music first came into Seth Glier’s life in second grade, he says, when he “got really interested in singing the national anthem before my sporting events.” He was 12 when […]
TURNING ON A DIME
Wild, Untamed, and Hard to Describe
The Invincible (formerly Incredible) Casuals, reborn, are writing songs and performing again
After a three-decade run, the Incredible Casuals, a Cape Cod rock band described by Rolling Stone as “the Beach Boys meets the Who,” disbanded in 2013. The band had performed […]
HER STORY
Clara Schumann’s Romances
A classical concert of ‘mavericks’ brings a hidden master to light
The obituary of Clara Schumann, who died on May 20, 1896 at age 76, was published on June 1 of that year in The Musical Times and Singing-Class Circular. The […]
MARINE BARNYARD CHORUS
Annie Lewandowski Hears Jazz in Whale Songs
With help from cetaceans, a composer and her students learn to improvise
On their last day in Provincetown earlier this month, a group of Cornell University students piled into a van and drove to Herring Cove Beach at dusk. Though their artistic […]
MUSIC FOR LIVING
When Home Is Where the Heart Is
Cara Brindisi, a singer-songwriter and music therapist, finds a place of her own
Two years ago, Cara Brindisi went into her blind audition for Season 22 of The Voice with a plan: to join Blake Shelton’s team if the country star turned his […]
IN TUNE
Music of the People, for the People
Hildaland waltzes into the hidden corners of quietude and freedom
In the folklore of Orkney, the wind-and-rain-lashed, green-cliffed archipelago in the north of Scotland, “Hildaland” — meaning “hidden land” — is a paradisiacal island, invisible to most, that is the […]
DEEP ROOTS
Paying His Dues and Playing the Blues
Fred Clayton, the ‘Blues Man of Cape Cod,’ has something to say
Before Fred Clayton had a guitar, he played “a stick with a string on it” — a “giant twig” curved and strung like an archer’s bow. He strummed along to […]
INSTRUMENTATION
Mike Block Plays It All on the Cello
His ‘bluegrass-adjacent’ trio is coming to Wellfleet
Mike Block’s first instrument was the violin. But at nine, he switched to cello. “I was a short kid,” he says. Since he was small, “it was incredible to create […]
