Seeing as this week’s cover package is all about Virginia’s festivals, it’s worth considering festivals happening elsewhere that outdo local ones. It was with that in mind—partially, at least—that I headed down to the Tar Heel State last weekend to the Hopscotch Festival, an indie rock-centric festival (sponsored by a newspaper very much like this […]

By day, John Alexander works for the Centers for Computation Intensive Research and Scholarship at UVA. But on nights and weekends, with Diane Ober, he organizes a local group called the Rivanna River Sacred Harp, Charlottesville’s steward of what some claim is the oldest surviving American musical tradition: Shape Note singing. 

Earlier this year, I received an e-mail from the lead mentor at Light House Studio, the film mentoring program to which students show up never having held a camera, and sometimes leave with an acceptance letter from a prestigious film school. Jason Robinson, the mentor, said the studio was running a program for advanced students wherein the kids would create music videos over the course of a week for songs by local musicians, and would I be willing to let the kids make a video for one of my songs?