The great warrior Ashoka had conquered much of the Indian subcontinent for the Mauryan Dynasty about a quarter of a millennium BCE. He had won a great battle of Kalinga at the cost of one hundred thousand lives in the process creating an additional 150 thousand refugees and great suffering. We don’t begrudge our great…

Funny that as a longtime clarinetist I failed to notice the wooden-ness of the sound of the instrument until recently hearing a master clarinettist David Krakauer. I wondered, is the clarinet a woodwind by virtue of sound initiated by the vibration of a wooden reed? Probably not, as the flute and recorders have no reeds.…