We all have the pieces we listen to less than we sit through. Where we think, “Wake me up when it’s over.” Every so often, though, a performer will play those works in a way that makes us bolt upright. Few violinists do this to me as regularly as Augustin Hadelich. He lavishes such attention […]
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Edvard Grieg, Aura Farmer
On approach to Troldhaugen, a straight, wide avenue splits into spaghetti paths: down to the shoreside grave, up to the villa, left to the glass-fronted concert hall, and further left to the composing hut. Tracing each route is like walking through a video game landscape. This is World of Grieg, a place where footsteps slow, […]
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On the Bridge to Forever
You may find yourself at Lincoln Center. You may find yourself sitting in the Wu Tsai Theater inside David Geffen Hall, where the New York Philharmonic plays. You may find yourself seeing 100 musicians, each with an electric guitar in hand, coming on stage, then playing together to produce massive, rolling waves of sound. And […]
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New Masters
On Monday, Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas.” It sets out his vision for how we can best harness artificial intelligence without stripping away human dignity. Warning against “the construction of yet another Tower of Babel” and the dangers of standardization and the concentration of power, he insists technology cannot be human. […]
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Perceptual Astronomy
Fifty years ago, the American composer Maryanne Amacher set about the creation of a major new work: not a symphony or a string quartet, but a TV series. Originally titled “Sound Saga,” the piece, even at this early stage, was already remarkably—perhaps unprecedentedly—elaborate. The plot was based on Arthur C. Clarke’s baroque far-future space opera […]
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Turned-On Bach
Bach’s music has been recorded on synthesizer, launched into outer space, and inspired 300 years of Western classical music. Now, it’s on OnlyFans. On May 13, the Berlin-based violist, composer, and arranger Shasta Ellenbogen premiered the first of a new series of solo viola performances on OnlyFans. Performing naked in her living room, Ellenbogen filmed one-shot […]
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The Impossible Task
This year’s Venice Biennale of Art is titled “In Minor Keys,” a curatorial vision proposed by the late Koyo Kouoh, who died a year before the Biennale opened last week. The theme asks us to take a deep breath, close our eyes, and listen for the music that continues in the face of repression, tragedy, […]
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“The Music Still Has to Go On”
Like few others, the composer Carlos Simon’s artistic work has been subject to the changing political winds at the Kennedy Center. He came to the institution in 2021 as part of an industry-wide reckoning with legacies of racism. He will leave amid unprecedented turmoil and with the Center itself closed for Trumpian renovations. We spoke […]
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Inside the Sound of the Swarm
“The granular dimension of time is the secret to bug music. I don’t just mean the music bugs make, but something wider and deeper, the ‘bug music’ aspect of life, or the bug and the glitch hiding inside all music.”—David Rothenberg The peripatetic, protosurrealist writer and translator Lafcadio Hearn had a severe case of myopia. […]
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The Body That Carries
Aïda Nosrat’s “Common Routes” sounds, at first, like a record about travel. It takes several listenings to fix its geometry: The accordion is French, the guitar idiom is Manouche, the groove absorbed from Burkina Faso. Nosrat’s voice moves through all of it with an ease that suggests she has been waiting for these specific interlocutors […]