Arts & Culture

Some people respond to suffering by turning it into art. That's true even with the harrowing experience of a pandemic.

In the early 1400s, an Englishman named John Cooke composed Stella celi, a hymn to the Virgin Mary referencing the Black Plague which, according to some sources, wiped out half of Europe. Its text speaks of the "ulcers of a terrible death" but also the assurance that "the star of heaven ... has rooted out the plague."

Sequestering is getting old, right? And so are reruns of every sitcom you've ever watched. Maybe it's time to face the music ... and dance, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

They danced America through the Great Depression. No reason they can't dance us through this — he, suave and ever on the make; she, lovely and feisty when she feels she's been crossed. He's forever crossing her.

Classical music opinionator Fran Hoepfner (@franhoepfner) joins Here & Now‘s Robin Young to discuss the music that lifts her spirits during the coronavirus crisis: Mikhail Glinka’s “Overture” in D Major, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Russian Easter Festival” and Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite.”

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

From Texas Standard:

The Go-Go's' debut album, Beauty and the Beat, climbed to the No. 1 spot on the Billboard chart in 1981. A year later, their second album, Vacation, reached No. 8. A harbinger for the new wave movement, the Go-Go's were also making history as the first multiplatinum-selling, all-female band that played their own instruments, wrote their own songs and had a No. 1 album.

Now, bassist Kathy Valentine, an Austin native, has published a memoir, All I Ever Wanted, detailing her experience with the band.