Composer, percussionist, improviser, and UC Irvine professor Lukas Ligeti spoke with me from his home in Bushwick, New York, for nearly two hours coming off the heels of an evening showcasing his works at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. As the only son of György Ligeti, one of the most innovative and influential composers in the […]
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Posted inHistory
Scores on the Sidewalk
In late 1981 or early 1982, the composer and vocalist Julius Eastman was evicted from his apartment in New York City. City marshals placed his belongings on the sidewalk, including all of his scores, and Eastman walked away, leaving everything behind. After years of drifting in and out of homeless shelters and bumming money from […]
Posted inInterview
Timelapse
For Intro, we speak with the musicians who don’t show up in press releases. We hope to portray a diversity of background and experience in classical music. This is the third interview in an ongoing series.When I thought of who I would Intro, Natalie Draper immediately came to mind. I spent the summer of 2015 […]
Posted inInterview
Established Meaning
For some interviews, you exchange what feels like dozens of emails with publicists. You’re asked what you want to ask. When I wrote to Reinhard Goebel to see if he wanted to speak to me, he wrote, “You won’t be needing to suggest topics for us to discuss. I can talk about a lot of […]
Posted inInterview
The Elusive Middle
Nothing heightens feelings of powerlessness more than a political season. Over the past few months, we’ve seen parties fractured, pundits paralyzed, analytics rendered ineffectual. Fault lines shatter old allegiances, and formerly stable demographics appear to no longer apply. The democratic tradition itself feels newly imperiled; as the middle class dissolves, the world’s ultra-rich consolidate their […]
Posted inReview
Cosmos
At 7 p.m. on Saturday, August 6, the line just outside the entrance of the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn, New York, was already sprawling around the block. It was the kind of large crowd that might be expected for, say, the U.S. folk-rock band The Lumineers, which had played a benefit concert at the […]
Posted inInterview
Thousands of Changes
In February, Andris Nelsons told VAN about conducting Wagner in Bayreuth: “You enjoy it masochistically.” On June 30, he asked to be released from his contract, with the festival citing “a differing approach in various matters.” The performance artist and provocateur Jonathan Meese, the director for this year’s production of “Parsifal,” was let go. It’s […]
Posted inInterview
Some Rawness
Lisa Renèe Coons is a composer, sound artist, and professor at Western Michigan University. Through the course of several emails exchanged in the last few weeks, just after her return from a residency at the MacDowell Colony, we discussed the difficulty of honoring one’s origins, music as a vehicle for dealing with the unspeakable, welding, […]
Posted inEssay
Mezzo-sopranos from Outer Space
In 2015, the writer Lisa Bolekaja published a short story in Uncanny, a magazine for science fiction and fantasy, called “Three Voices,” inspired by the Morton Feldman piece of the same name. At the climax, a vocalist’s skin pigmentation drains from her body and her eyes pop out. “How could she sing with no head?” […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Pekka Kuusisto Playlist
“Hi VANdals,” Pekka Kuusisto writes to us in the email with this playlist. The Finnish violinist, experimenter, and artistic director of the Meidän Festivaali (“Our Festival”) in Järvenpää, will visit his home country on tour with the Minnesota Orchestra this August, playing Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto; in September, he’ll be traveling to Germany with Ligeti’s Concerto, […]