Free Republic

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit alleging that President Donald Trump's campaign and former Trump adviser Roger Stone conspired with Russia and WikiLeaks to publish hacked Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 presidential race. U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle said in a ruling Tuesday evening that the suit's efforts to tie the Trump campaign and Stone's alleged actions to the nation's capital were too flimsy for the case to proceed in a Washington, D.C., court. "The Trump Campaign’s efforts to elect President Trump in D.C. are not suit-related contacts for those efforts did not involve acts taken...

Audio: a production, done in 1977 by Robert Conrad, the founder of WCLV classical radio in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. The script was written by conductor Kenneth Jean and Mathias Bamert is said to have had a role in the production. Video: ascvideo (Arnold Schönberg Center, Wien)

A full century after Arnold Schoenberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern unleashed their harsh chords on the world, modern classical music remains an unattractive proposition for many concertgoers. Last season at the New York Philharmonic, several dozen people walked out of a performance of Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra; about the same number exited Carnegie Hall before the Vienna Philharmonic struck up Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra. The mildest 20th-century fare can cause audible gnashing of teeth. Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings is a more or less fully tonal score, yet in 2009 at Lincoln...

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES, OR THE METAPHYSICS OF MUSIC . . . According to tradition, the harmonic structure of music was discovered by Pythagoras about the fifth century B.C. Pythagoras experimented with a stretched piece of cord. When plucked, the cord sounded a certain note. When halved in length and plucked again, the cord sounded a higher note completely consonant with the first. In fact, it was the same note at a higher pitch. Pythagoras had discovered the ration 2:1, of the octave. Further experiments, plucking the strings two-thirds of its original length produced a perfect fifth in the...