During this holiday season of giving, many of us put up a Christmas tree. We decorate it with ornaments and place gifts for our loved ones underneath. What is the origin and evolution of this long tradition? A Transcendent Symbol Evergreen trees—the type of tree often used for Christmas trees—has had symbolic use all throughout…

NEW YORK—Even for a legendary film director like Martin Scorsese, the assignment was a daunting one. Take one of the famous American period rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and make essentially a one-frame movie with no camera: a tableau, not a film, but using your cinematic sensibility. Your actors are mannequins, and the…

My work as a composer has taken me with some regularity to New York City, and each time I’ve had a bucket list of things I’ve either always wanted to do or wanted to do again during my free time there. One of those “do agains” has been to visit the huge Metropolitan Museum of…