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 […]
Posted inReview
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, […]
Posted inInterview
“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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inBreaking
The Eternal Hunting Grounds
On April 24, Günter Pichler, a founding member and the first violinist of the Alban Berg Quartet, died at the age of 85. Here, Krzysztof Chorzelski, the violist of the Belcea Quartet, remembers the great musician who was his mentor. When I was a teenager living in Poland, I discovered the Alban Berg Quartet’s recording […]
Posted inReport
Filling the Map
In 2013, director and soprano Julia Mintzer sang in a revival of “Die Zauberflöte” at the Semperoper Dresden. The production was mounted, Mintzer said, “in three fucking days.” At the same house, she told me, “Ariadne auf Naxos” was on its feet in a week, and “La Traviata” in a luxurious two—but only because the leads were new […]
Posted inReview
Posing The Question of Palestine at Crisco Disco
A librettist-turned-priest, a dramatic soprano, and the creative director of Christian Dior walk into a bar called Crisco Disco. It’s a late April evening in Florence, and the room smells of high-end fragrances, mildew, and poppers. A bear in a SnapBack is spinning tech house. Dancers dance. The walls are covered with guides to the […]
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What’s Left to Do
In January, Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe realized he’d been overdoing it. In February, he had a health scare—a false alarm, but one that nonetheless prompted him to book time off and reevaluate his working habits. For almost a decade now, he has been the definition of an artist in a hurry, releasing nine albums since 2017 (counting “Vesper,” […]