Kim Jong-il, the late Dear Leader of the People’s Republic of Korea, wrote six operas in two years. Not only that: according to one version of his official biography, they are all “better than any in the history of music.” Even accounting for the immodesty of dictators, this claim is unusual. Most despots see themselves […]
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Posted inOpinion
Classical Music Isn’t Cool
Hey, did you know that classical music is actually really, really cool? The composers were “insane rock stars” who behaved outrageously and had lots of sex! In fact, Franz Liszt was the world’s first rock star! …Or was it Beethoven? Maybe it was Mozart. In any case, their behavior definitely qualifies them as rock stars, […]
Posted inHistory
Black Magic
On the evening of March 7, 1983, the French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier went for a drink at a bar in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris. He picked up a young man there and brought him back to his apartment for sex. The man then stabbed Vivier to death. If, before he fled, the killer had […]
Posted inPlaylist
An Olga Neuwirth Playlist
Malaria! – “Geld/Money” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13OiNFPINKc In the 1980s, I was a punk living in the Austrian countryside, and I couldn’t wait to trade alpine meadows for a big, rough city. This all-girl band from Berlin made provocative, social-political, tough-as-nails songs; they inspired me to be loud, and ironic, and stir things up in my uptight environment. […]
Posted inHistory
Free But Alone
No one composer, perhaps in the history of Western classical music, was more active in averting history’s prying eyes than Johannes Brahms. Brutally self-critical about his own work and exceptionally shy when it came to his personal life, Brahms sought to preserve his legacy by keeping his private thoughts out of the grips of unforgiving […]
Posted inEssay
Strange Dissonance
Goethe’s “Erlkönig” is one of the most horrifying poems in all of world literature. At its center is an unspeakable tragedy, the death of a child. Also shocking is the language of the poem: it omits any description of the boy’s suffering. The very objectivity of Goethe’s language is chilling. In Schubert’s setting of “Erlkönig,” […]
Posted inInterview
Decades
I studied composition with Georg Friedrich Haas in Basel from 2011-2013, his last years there before his move to New York City, where he teaches at Columbia University. In my Master’s recital, a musician showed late and an instrument I built broke, and I had trouble facing the—very supportive—audience. He managed to make me do […]
Posted inInterview
Stay Worried
I first met Betsy Jolas, a distinguished composer with a nearly 70-year career, in 2005. I had received a scholarship to attend the Academie Villecroze in Provence, France, and performed a piece of hers there. The work was “Mon Ami,” for a pianist; it’s unique in that the pianist sings, her voice melding with the […]
Posted inReport
“All That Matters Is How Good It Sounds”
1. Prelude In 2007, I was introduced to the Venezuelan youth orchestra training program El Sistema. I’m the founder of the Music-in-Education program and the Center for Music-in-Education at the New England Conservatory, and the program was presented to me as a radical shift in the scope and focus of international youth orchestra development. At […]
Posted inEssay
Sala São Paulo
On a Friday evening last December, my wife and I arrived at one of São Paulo’s major train stations, the Estação da Luz, during rush hour. Several metropolitan lines connect with regional transit to the suburbs there, and it was thronged with tired commuters. We elbowed our way past them and through the station’s labyrinthine […]