Free Republic

A 23-year-old woman has been arrested for last week’s a brutal, caught-on-video bottle attack on a New York City subway performer — who said Thursday that he is once again ready to play his cello. Amira Hunter, of Brooklyn, was captured by the NYPD Wednesday evening — 15 days after she allegedly battered Iain S. Forrest, 29, as he performed “Titanium” by Sia in the Herald Square station. Hunter is well-known to police, with eight prior arrests. She was last taken into custody in October after stealing $2,050 worth of bathing suits from New York’s famous Bergdorf Goodman. Hunter, who...

Hee-Young Lim, a Korean cellist, launched her first CD French Cello Concertos last November. Now she is tapping into the classical music world in China. "Playing the cello feels like meditation, it becomes sort of a mirror and helps you see within yourself. And since I have no siblings and used to spend a lot of time alone reading books, my parents felt this was all good because it was almost as though I had a constant companion in the cello!" Hee-Young Lim recalled the beginning of her musical journey. The Seoul-born musician entered the Korean National University at age...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT3SBzmDxGk&feature=player_embedded As Fr. Z says, "[t]his just goes to show that an instrument, a tool, is neutral. We choose to use them in certain ways."

It looks and plays like a piano, but it sounds like a string quartet — and it took 500 years before anyone built it. Leonardo da Vinci’s flight of fancy in designing a hammerless piano, called a “viola organista,” has come to life half a millenium after da Vinci designed it, thanks to a Polish concert pianist and musical engineer. It couldn’t have sounded any better in da Vinci’s head (via Brad Thor and Dan Gainor): A bizarre instrument combining a piano and cello has finally been played to an audience more than 500 years after it was dreamt up...

Legendary cellist and teacher renowned for his focused playing and aristocratic style passes at the age of 88. Born in Budapest in 1924, János Starker was given a cello at the age of five and soon proved to be a child prodigy making his first appearances at the age of seven. He trained under Adolf Schiffer at the Franz Liszt Academy where his teachers included Leo Weiner, Kodály, Bartók and Dohnányi. By the age of 12 he had five pupils of his own.

Bernard Greenhouse, an internationally acclaimed cellist and a founding member of the Beaux Arts Trio, died on Friday at his home in Wellfleet, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was 95.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A medical ailment that has worried male members of string sections across the music world for over 30 years has been exposed as a hoax.

YO! I'M FOR DUBYAClassical Musician Yo-Yo Ma and R&B star Brian McKnight, speaking on the Grammys red carpet, talk about their support for President George W. BushVideo Presentation