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Pantherophis alleghaniensis, commonly called the eastern rat snake, is a species of nonvenomous snake in the family Colubridae. The species is endemic to North America.

Many live event venues continue to struggle to bring back their pre-pandemic crowds. Our next guest’s facility in the Midlands is taking steps to remedy that situation. Mike Switzer interviews Nate Terracio, director of the Koger Center for the Arts in Columbia, SC.

Acoustics is the science of sound, but the word also refers to the qualities of a room—the qualities that determine and describe how things sound in that room.

The Friends of the Congaree Swamp is a conservation organization that plans trail cleanups, makes recommendations to South Carolina DHEC when appropriate, and is dedicated to the conservation of this treasured part of South Carolina’s ecology; the newsletters they share keep us abreast of current affairs and upcoming opportunities.

Our state has lost a remarkable citizen, Charleston gardener and hostess Patti McGee. Her love of gardening originated under her mother’s tutelage in Marion, South Carolina. Her husband Peter was supportive of constant tweaking and additions to their Anson Street property. McGee’s inquisitive mind and love of new people as well as plants, made her beloved by both the artistic and gardening community.

The da capo aria, which I talked about yesterday, was a form that by 1750 had begun to lose its once enormous popularity. It was a form that was essentially killed by excess. The reign of the da capo aria coincided with the reign of the castrati as the stars of Italian opera.

No piece of music is ever just “about” any one thing. In Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni stands beneath Donna Elvira’s window and sings the aria Deh vieni alla finestra, “Come to the window, O my treasure.” It’s a serenade, a love song, and a very beautiful one. But there’s one big problem: it’s a fake.

Imagine, for a moment, Mozart walking down Broadway, in New York City. It’s not so easy. But Lorenzo da Ponte, who wrote the librettos for Mozart’s operas Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and Così fan tutte, died a New Yorker.

Maurice Ravel was certainly a composer who pushed boundaries, including the technical boundaries that musicians faced when performing his music.

For about a hundred years, roughly from 1650 to 1750, the principal type of aria in opera, and also in the oratorios and cantatas of such composers as Bach and Handel, was the da capo aria.