Last month, Resonus Classics released an album of orchestral compositions by Avril Coleridge-Taylor, the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and a composer whose works defied the gendered and racialized expectations of her time. The project, which includes the world premiere recording of her Piano Concerto, was realized by pianist-scholar Dr. Samantha Ege, conductor Dr. John Andrews, […]
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Posted inEssay
Eccentric Physics
Set and Setting It was Wednesday, early October. I had borrowed a friend’s kitchen to make 100 servings of strudel for my six-year-old son’s school event, and I was listening to John Cage’s “Music of Changes,” which takes form through chance operations and the wisdom of the I Ching. Earlier in the morning, I’d made […]
Posted inInterview
How You Say The Thing
The Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi is among the most active and interesting conductors of his generation. His work is characterized by a constant curiosity and a sensitive yet revealing approach to the music, with a refreshing combination of intellect and—in the case of Gustav Mahler—explosive spontaneity. He also stands publicly in opposition to the Russian […]
Posted inInterview
Clinging to Beauty
Under a makeshift shelter—a parachute canopy from aid airdrops stretched over a wooden frame—Ahmed Abu Amsha gathers children for music lessons on the beach in Nuseirat camp, central Gaza. The sounds of guitar, oud, and drums mix with the crash of waves. Displaced children, some barefoot, wearing torn clothes, their bodies thin and faces pale, are […]
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On the Shore of the Cosmos
Conductor Maxime Pascal delights in the vast, the weird, and the borderline unachievable. At the Salzburg Festival this year, he offered a program featuring two of Pierre Boulez’s most forbidding works—”Sur Incises” and “…explosante-fixe…”—each lasting around 40 minutes and featuring ensemble writing of dazzling complexity. Just programming one is a feat; Pascal did both, with […]
Posted inEssay
The Last Romantic
“Guero” for piano Soft, almost imperceptible sounds for minutes. In concert, the work has a paradoxical effect: What we see is the traditional virtuoso performance situation. What we hear is a microcosm of perforated percussion sounds in quadruple pianissimo. And then, at the very end: Two different strings in the high register are softly plucked. […]
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An Explosive Legacy
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival—or HCMF for short—is in full swing, celebrating its 48th edition with performances, workshops, installations and more, all against the backdrop of mounting economic pressures in the UK’s arts sector. Over 48 hours of concerts, interviews and informal networking receptions, I tried to work out how the festival is negotiating a harsher […]
Posted inReport
Under The Mask
In August 2023, the orchestral conductor Rebecca Bryant Novak began a doctor of musical arts degree at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Bryant Novak, who had spent time working as a conductor after getting her master’s, decided to go back to school to build a strong professional portfolio. She “felt like […]
Posted inInterview
The Generator
I first met the composer Huang Ruo in 2017 at a crosstown bus stop in New York after a performance of Pierre Boulez’s “Repons” at the Park Avenue Armory. We talked about the effect of the chamber group situated in the middle of the audience, surrounded by the soloists and amplification, with waves of sound […]
Posted inEssay
The Unexplainable Residue of Silence
For Ramón Andrés, Spain’s most gifted contemporary writer on music, poetry is the hidden measure of his prose. In a recent article for VAN, he told me that whenever he wishes to express something with particular clarity and resonance, he writes in meter, in decasyllables. The result is prose of exact proportion, tempered and lucid, […]