"I've always wanted to have a smash, but I rather doubt that I ever will," Stephen Sondheim said in the mid-1970s. Judging from their reviews, West Side Story(1957) and Gypsy (1959)—for which he wrote the lyrics—ought to have been smashes, Sondheim remarked, but smash hits spring from stories audiences want to hear, "and it's always the same story: how everything turns out terrific in the end, and the audience goes out thinking, That's what life is all about."

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In our mind's eye, many of us can see, in granular detail, scenes we remember, scenes others describe for us, scenes we conjure from thin air. How many can hear sound that isn't out there in the air? Apparently very few. As the composer/performer/master-educator Bruce Adolphe sees is, that capacity is a sine qua non for composers and performers working in any style. Music lovers who just listen are far the richer for it, too.

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Back in the 1960s, the American military thought they had an ace in the hole, flying their fighter jets above the range of radar. But somehow, the Soviets were picking them out of thin air. How did they do that? Undercover in Indonesia, the young CIA operative Daniel F. Cameron found the answer: missiles tipped with heat-seeking nose cones. A half century later, Dan tells how he laid hands not only on copies of the operating manuals but even on the critical hardware, with game-changing effect. His memoir In Red Weather: Turmoil In Indonesia—A CIA Insider's Account from the 1960s brings back an age of low-tech espionage in faraway places still steeped in the mystery we associate with the pages of Joseph Conrad.

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In Brussels, Black Lives Matter

The Time of Our Singing, an operatic mixed-race American family saga, speaks to our historical moment with an eloquence that transcends it

Finding one's voice: His brother is the toast of La Scala, but Joey (Peter Brathwaite) is most at home in the background, playing barroom piano.

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