The Oncoming Cacerolazo: Stories and Sounds from Puerto Rico’s Massive Protests
Drumming and loud sound are such large parts of Puerto Rican culture, it only makes sense they’d be the focal point of this week’s protests. Take a listen!
-
-
Next Week Is Home Recording Week on Soundfly!
From June 17-21, 2019 we’re sharing tons of new and archival content about home recording across Flypaper, our social channels, and more. Stay tuned!
-
How Rap Ushered the Piano Into Its Next Developmental Phase
Hip-hop is officially pop music. With Bruno Mars and Kendrick Lamar’s sweep of the Grammy Awards earlier this year, it’s evident that hip-hop has officially shed its status as “that controversial music genre” that prompted the Grammys’ organizers to refuse to air any rap categories back in 1989, which subsequently prompted some to boycott the event.…
-
Spider Hands: Writing with a Deadly Genetic Disorder
How Marfan Syndrome killed my music career, replaced it with a writing career, and helped me see the connective tissue flowing through everything. “You have spider hands,” the doctor said. Known formally as arachnodactyly, it was the thin, elegant structure of my hands that — along with the abnormal curvature of my spine, and my generally…
-
From the Editor’s Desk – a Look Back at 2017
Dear Reader, THANK YOU for all the support you’ve given us this year. You’re one of well over a million new people we’ve met in the last 12 months, and we couldn’t be happier that you’ve somehow found your way here. If this is your first time landing to rest your wings on Flypaper, you’ve got…
-
Soundfly’s 2017 Year-End Music Favorites: Albums, Songs, Articles, and More!
It’s getting a little ridiculous now. Too much great, new music is coming out every single week, and it’s tough to keep up. And since we here at Soundfly HQ can be found, most weeks, grooving out to the new, freshly composed, produced, and mixed sounds of our talented students alongside all the commercially released…
-
Puerto Rico: One Musician’s Story and the Venue That’s Helping Her Through It
Story by Jhoni Jackson. Photo Essay by Jose Juan Garcia Camacho. Shanti Lalita was asleep when Hurricane Maria nearly ripped off the bedroom window of her fourth-floor apartment in the San Juan neighborhood of Santurce. It was 5:00 a.m., and the 27-year-old cellist and composer was napping between bouts of vigilance as the category-five storm that ravaged the…
-
Hear a Never-Before-Seen 1986 Dexter Gordon Piece, Played by 8 Different Artists
In November 2016, Peter Pillitteri, an aspiring composer and one of the students in Ian Davis’ popular Orchestration for Strings course, emailed us out of the blue to tell us this incredible story: “‘Round Midnight is a 1986 film by Bertrand Tavernier about a fictitious jazzman, Dale Turner, who was played by the great jazz saxophonist, Dexter Gordon.…
-
The True Story Behind Japanese ‘Lawsuit’ Guitars
Welcome to 6String Minutes. In this segment, we’ll uncover the truth about Japanese “lawsuit” guitars imported to the United States from the mid-1970s on. Gear hunters and enthusiasts around the world all claim to have seen them, but the true story may shock you.* (* If you happen to be plugged into an ungrounded amplifier and…
-
How ‘Hamilton’ Put the Music Back at the Center of the Musical
It’s been dissected as a runaway commercial success. It’s been analyzed as an incisive commentary on current race relations. It’s even, at times, received its due as an example of complex poetry in rap. But, rather counterintuitively, relatively few trained musicians have talked about this Broadway hit as pure music in and of itself. Leaving the…
