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 […]
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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, […]
Posted inReview
The Nobility and Carelessness of Humans
Così fan tutte” is a peculiar opera. The last of the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, it was the least performed in the creators’ lifetimes, then largely disappeared for most of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Successful performances after World War II at Glyndebourne brought new interest in the work, and its […]
Posted inReport
Grokipedia Is A Terrible Way To Learn About Music
One week ago, Elon Musk took a break from his busy schedule of defunding pediatric cancer research and paying other people to play video games for him to launch Grokipedia, an LLM-generated and LLM-edited online encyclopedia explicitly designed as a competitor to Wikipedia. Musk’s rationale for launching this tool is based on his perception that […]
Posted inOpinion
Is Beatrice Venezi’s Appointment Really Based on Merit?
Everywhere you look, politics are seeping into opera. In New York, Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb, accompanied onstage by Democratic senator Chuck Schumer, gave a rousing opening-night speech defending freedom of artistic expression. The Met’s audience, not usually known for its progressiveness, booed Schumer for failing to endorse mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Three weeks […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
Eight Unintentionally Funny Works of Classical Music
One of the great joys of getting to know classical music is learning to recognize how funny it can be. Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony may not seem like a particularly interesting piece the first time you hear it, but once you can appreciate the ways it subverts the conventions of classical development—the last movement razzes the […]
Posted inEssay
Classical Music’s Weirdest Popularizer
Have you ever wondered what Richard Wagner would have looked like in a superhero costume? Or how Ursula Vaughan Williams jived on the dancefloor? Or how good Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was in bed? Fifty years ago this month, Ken Russell’s “Lisztomania” was premiered in London. In this film, the most outrageous of the 12 pictures the […]
Posted inInterview
“To Be a Musician Is to Desire a Piece of Music”
Last week at the Philharmonie in Berlin, the ensemble Pygmalion under conductor Raphaël Pichon performed a concert of sacred music from during and after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). It was a brutally destructive conflict that by some estimates decimated the German population by half. And though religious tensions were among the causes for the […]
Posted inEssay
Gap Trap Laugh, Part II
PART II VI.Shimmering Ontology / (Laugh) Struck by the apparition, she burst out laughing. The laughter of childbirth.—Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils Kundry’s primal scene—the instant of her transformation into the figure of the eternal feminine pariah—takes place at the base of the cross: having laughed at the body of Christ, she endures as […]
Posted inOpinion
The Rhizome
Every piece of music has a political context, including the person or institution commissioning the work, the space in which the music is performed, the funding mechanisms and the audience’s social background. In the 20th century, complex contemporary music was generally associated with democracy, because it represented a form of individual expression that was unacceptable […]