August 29, 2008
She won a Tony this year for her performance as Mama Rose, in "Gypsy." The musical tells the story of legendary vaudeville performer Gypsy Rose Lee and her overbearing stagemom. Kurt talks with LuPone about playing Mama Rose –- a role that some consider the King Lear of American musical theater.
From the Gypsy - 2008 Original Broadway Cast album (Time Life Entertainment).
Reporter Melik Kaylan is recently back from Iraq, where he reported for the Wall Street Journal. He tells Kurt about his visit with Karim Wasfi, conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra. Throughout five years of wartime life in Baghdad, the symphony has kept performing against all odds.
Guitarist Ghassan al Mosuli once played John Denver songs at the Saddam Hussein Cultural Center. Now he dreams of moving to the United States, to a rustic cabin in the mountains. But as an Iraqi refugee in Syria, he can’t get a visa. As Theo Padnos discovered, the uncertainty and displacement of wartime hasn’t curbed al Mosuli’s passion for American folk music.
Ghassan al Mosuli sings the Creedence Clearwater Revival classic (from the band's 1969 album Green River).
Biologist Bernie Krause believes animals communicate with each other on their own frequencies, and when you put all those frequencies together, they interact in a way not unlike a symphony orchestra. He calls it "biophony." Jill DuBoff talked to Krause about his research in the wild, and got an even wilder story about his pre-scientist days as a 1960s music pioneer.
Today rock band T-shirts are sold at major retailers, to kids who weren't alive when classic rock was born. But when music writer Johan Kugelberg was growing up in Sweden, wearing the Sex Pistols or Ramones on your chest was its own act of rebellion. Produced by Andrea Silenzi.
It's become a kind of sport for music-lovers to mourn yet another almost-obsolete technology. For Jocelyn Gonzales it's the cassette tape. Her old mix tapes can't be recreated in a playlist on iTunes -– they're a special medium unto themselves.
Studio 360 is a co-production of
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WNYC New York Public Radio, and is funded in part by
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National Endowment for the Arts, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, and
DK Eyewitness Travel. Studio 360's American Icons series is supported in part by the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Our series on creativity and science is supported in part by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Our series on Underground Heroes is supported in part by the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. 
