The third annual Baylor Percussion Symposium, with events both today and Saturday, hopes to not only offer audience members an auditory and visual experience, but a visceral one as well.
“We had our sights set on this at the beginning of the year,” said Dr. Todd Meehan, assistant professor of percussion.
A Baylor student will share the stage with some of the biggest names in country music on Sunday.
McGregor sophomore Trannie Stevens will sing at the 2013 Texas Heritage Songwriters’ Hall of Fame Awards Show. Stevens will join Toby Keith, Jack Ingram, Larry Gatlin, Ronnie Dunn and Sonny Curtis as performers at the show in Austin.
A country music legend will perform 9 p.m. on Saturday at Whiskey River.
Johnny Lee, a Texas Country Music Hall of Fame artist with chart toppers from the late 1970s, will headline the event. Some of his top singles include “Lookin’ For Love,” “One In A Million” and “Bet Your Heart On Me.”
Sam Badar, owner of Whiskey River on Bosque Drive, said he looks forward to having Lee on the Whiskey River stage.
Saturday night, the Waco Symphony Orchestra will perform its second concert of the year, entitled “Paris of the Roaring Twenties.”
The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Waco Hall.
Stephen Heyde, music director and conductor of the Waco Symphony Orchestra, said the program will hearken back to a time and place that was unique and perhaps unparalleled in cultural history.
The musical numbers on Sunday’s Academy Awards telecast by most accounts were hit and miss, but in some respects the most impressive song wasn’t one of the big production numbers from “Les Miserables” or “Skyfall.”
It was the one host Seth MacFarlane and singer Kristin Chenoweth sang while the closing credits rolled, “Here’s to the Losers.”
In a drastically revamped version of the Jack Segal-Robert Wells ode to underdogs recorded by Frank Sinatra for his 1964 album “Softly, as I Leave You,” MacFarlane and Chenoweth served up a swinging musical salute to those who ended up with the short end of the Oscar stick Sunday.
Eight years ago, a former clown of the Ringling Bros. Circus opened the doors to a unique theater with live, family-friendly stage comedy in Central Texas.
After Saturday, those doors will close.
Grainger Esch, an alumnus of Duke University and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, is the artistic director and co-founder of the Silver Spur Theater in Salado, a town inside Bell County, 50 miles south of Waco.
Some of Baylor’s best singers will display their golden pipes for the community.
The Baylor Bella Voce choir will perform at 7:30 p.m. today in Roxy Grove Hall. The concert is free and open to the public.
The choir of 34 female singers will perform a concert titled “By, For, and About Women.”
Regal Entertainment Group, the nation’s largest theater chain, has purchased Waco’s Hollywood Jewel 16 and 42 other Hollywood Theaters across the country for $191 million.
Hollywood Jewel 16 is located at 7200 Woodway Drive.
Regal Entertainment, based out of Knoxville, Tenn., operates 6,880 screens across 38 states.
The study of Robert E. Browning, English poet and playwright, just got a little more contemporary.
Melinda Creech, a graduate assistant at the Armstrong Browning Library, has uncovered a connection in the library’s online digital archives between Browning and Highclere Castle, the set of the hit PBS show “Downton Abbey” — a British period drama which focuses on the fictional, aristocratic Crawley family in the early 20th century.
Before the start of the third season of Downton Abbey on Jan. 6, PBS aired a historical piece on the show, called “Secrets of Highclere Castle.” Creech, like many “Downton Abbey” fans, watched the piece to learn about the real history behind the show.
When is 13 a lucky number? When it’s the number of years it’s taken for the music industry to post its first yearly increase in global recorded music sales, which is what happened in 2012, according to new figures from the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry.
The group’s annual Digital Music Report, issued Tuesday in London, noted that overall music sales rose from $16.2 billion to $16.5 billion, or 0.3 percent, from 2011 to 2012, the first time in 13 years that worldwide sales didn’t decline.
All-University Sing audiences were surprised when judges announced a tie for first place.
During Saturday’s Sing finale, both Kappa Sigma and Kappa Omega Tau won first place.
Woodway senior Stephen Harrison, Sing chair for Kappa Sigma, said he was practically shaking while pumping a trophy in the air.
Tonight Baylor Jazz Ensemble concert will include everything from Count Basie to Radiohead.
The concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Jones Concert Hall in the Glennis McCrary Music Building and is free and open to the public.
“This is a concert where there will be literally something for almost everybody,” said Alex Parker, senior lecturer and director of jazz studies.
I had the pleasure of seeing the last performance of McLennan Community College Theater’s production of “Hairspray” on Sunday afternoon in the Ball Performing Arts Center on the MCC campus.
The play was directed by MCC theater director and choreographer Jerry MacLauchlin.
It is no secret that this play is probably one of the most well known since Adam Shankman remade the film, which came out in 2007. “Hairspray,” set in 1962 Baltimore, Md., is about a plump girl (Tracy Turnblad) who makes it on to a local dance show and becomes an instant celebrity. She soon makes it her mission to integrate the show and win the show’s pageant contest. The musical is a social commentary on race relations during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
The former Canadian ambassador to Iran who protected Americans at great personal risk during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis said Monday it was good to hear Ben Affleck finally thank Canada after Affleck’s film “Argo” won the Oscar for best picture.
“Argo” came under criticism from some Canadians, including former ambassador Ken Taylor, who said he felt slighted by the movie because it makes Canada look like a meek observer to CIA heroics. Taylor says it minimizes Canada’s role in the Americans’ rescue.
Iranian officials on Monday dismissed the Oscar-winning film “Argo” as anti-Iran, state TV dismissed it as CIA commercial, some viewers disparaged it as U.S. propaganda while others welcomed a fresh view of their recent history.
All this is despite the fact that the movie based on the escape of six American hostages from the besieged U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 has not been screened in any Iranian theaters.
Despite that ban, many Iranians have seen the movie. In downtown Tehran, bootleg DVDs of “Argo” sell for about 30,000 rials, or less than $1.
The 85th Academy Awards promised lots of upsets and surprises, and they delivered.
The night’s big winner was “Argo,” the fact-based drama about a mission in which the CIA teamed up with Hollywood producers for a rescue during the Iran hostage crisis. Although the film received seven nominations, it was initially discounted as a serious contender because its director Ben Affleck was not nominated.
You know those tall, leggy beauties that normally carry the Oscar trophies so the stars can present them?
They’ve been replaced this year by aspiring filmmakers. Six college students from across the country won a contest to help present the Oscar statuettes this year.
“This tradition of the buxom babe that comes out and brings the trophy to the presenter to give to the winner seemed to be very antiquated and kind of sexist, too,” said Neil Meron, co-producer of this year’s Academy Awards. “They’re just there to be objectified. Why can’t we have people who actually care about film and are the future of film be the trophy presenters?”
Baylor’s about to experience an influx of youth.
Starting at 6 p.m. today, Baylor will host many youth choir members for the Baylor YouthCUE Festival hosted by the Center for Christian Music Studies.
This event is expected to have nearly 400 registered singers and is sponsored by YouthCUE, the nation’s leading church youth choir organization. This will be the eight annual festival that Baylor has hosted.
Ever since he was 9 years old, Lorena High School senior Brett Hendrix has loved playing the guitar. By the time he was 13, Hendrix had already started his own band, the Brett Hendrix Band. Today, Hendrix’s band performs weekly at many different locations around Waco.
“I started playing in different places when I was 13 and drew a quick interest in having a full band rather than just me playing alone,” he said. “My brother was going to MCC and happened to have these two guys that wanted to start playing. I found a drummer and sure enough we kicked it off that summer.”
The spring semester is full of musical entertainment and diversions at Baylor, just as it is at McLennan Community College.
The MCC Theater will put on a reproduction of the Broadway hit “Hairspray” in the Ball Performing Arts Center located on the MCC campus at 7:30 tonight and Saturday.
Historians say the lesson of history is that there’s no such thing as a foreseeable future. Honest Oscar forecasters would have to agree.
When Emma Stone and Seth MacFarlane announced the Best Picture nominees Jan. 10, pundits immediately declared a front-runner. “The contest has come down to one film, and it’s ‘Lincoln,’ an excellent, very popular movie by a great director on a subject that inspires, uplifts, redeems. … It’s the perfect Academy movie,” wrote Wesley Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for the website Grantland.
The Dallas-based up-and-coming band Air Review is coming to Common Grounds on March 2 to play some songs from its new album “Low Wishes.”
The band currently has a single, “America’s Son,” playing on KXT, a Dallas radio station, and has been getting lots of media attention from organizations such as The Dallas Morning News, and the Denton-Record Chronicle.
