Articles by Michael Palmer

What Music Tells Us about Our Lives; or, "Well, Git It" by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra

by Michael Palmer
January 21, 2006

In “The Opposites in Music class at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York, I'm so fortunate to be learning about what makes for beauty in music and what it can teach us about ourselves. In one class, the teachers, Barbara Allen, Anne Fielding, and Edward Green asked, “Can music be used to be a courageous critic of oneself? The answer to that is a resounding “YES!

I've cared for the big band instrumental “Well, Git It since I first ...

Music Shows How We Want To Be: Artie Shaw's "Nightmare"

by Michael Palmer
June 8, 2005

The education Aesthetic Realism, founded by American poet and critic Eli Siegel (1902 -1978), describes what makes for beauty in music and shows how music comments centrally on what we're hoping for in our lives. “All beauty," Mr. Siegel stated, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."“There is not one thing that music does," Siegel once said in a lecture, “that does not say something ...