7302: Leonard Bernstein — The Double Life of America's Most Famous Conductor | pplpod
Leonard Bernstein composed West Side Story, conducted the New York Philharmonic, taught millions about music on television, and spent his private life torn between his marriage to Felicia Montealegre ...
17 Jun 21min
7301: Joni Mitchell — Life from Both Sides Now and the Cost of Artistic Reinvention | pplpod
Joni Mitchell gave up her daughter for adoption, wrote the songs that defined a generation, and then abandoned the folk music that made her famous to pursue jazz, electronic experimentation, and paint...
17 Jun 19min
7300: John Updike — Suburbia, Sex, and the Search for Salvation in Middle America | pplpod
John Updike wrote about suburban adultery with the precision of a jeweler and the moral seriousness of a theologian. His Rabbit novels tracked one ordinary American man across four decades and became ...
17 Jun 22min
7299: John Cage — The Composer Who Invented Silence and Changed What Music Could Be | pplpod
John Cage composed a piece called 4'33" in which no one plays a note for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. It was not a joke. It was the logical conclusion of a career spent dismantling every ass...
17 Jun 24min
7298: Joan Didion — The Architecture of Sentences and the Art of Controlled Collapse | pplpod
Joan Didion wrote sentences so precisely engineered that they made California wildfires and nervous breakdowns feel like the same kind of event — inevitable, structural, and beyond anyone's control. S...
17 Jun 20min
7297: Saul Bellow — How a Chicago Novelist Hacked the American Literary Establishment | pplpod
Saul Bellow was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who grew up speaking Yiddish in Chicago and muscled his way into the center of American literature through sheer verbal force. He won the Nobel Pri...
17 Jun 20min
7296: Claudio Monteverdi — The Composer Who Made Music Feel Human for the First Time | pplpod
Claudio Monteverdi took the rigid polyphonic music of the Renaissance and bent it until it could express individual human emotion. His opera L'Orfeo is considered the first great opera in history. His...
17 Jun 16min
7295: Leonard Cohen — How Betrayal, Bankruptcy, and Buddhism Produced Hallelujah | pplpod
Leonard Cohen wrote eighty drafts of "Hallelujah" before he was satisfied, and his record label refused to release the album containing it. The song was rescued by John Cale, then Jeff Buckley, and be...
17 Jun 19min
