The Belgian baroque violinist, violoncello da spalla player, and conductor Sigiswald Kuijken was born in 1944 near Brussels. His way of playing early music makes the continuing modern-style performances of many works seem, at least to my ears, completely irrelevant.When I reached out to Kuijken to ask if he’d like to be interviewed, he wrote […]
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Posted inEssay
Performance Paralysis
1. Rewired Circuits In the fall of 2015, my career as a violinist in Chicago was in trouble. On the outside, my level of success appeared to be growing: after living in the city for seven years, I was receiving invitations to play on bigger stages and take on bigger challenges. But, unbeknownst to almost […]
Posted inPlaylist
An Arthur Kampela Playlist
At this year’s MaerzMusik festival in Berlin, Arthur Kampela will present his research on Walter Smetak, an obscure Brazilian composer and inventor of instruments. Smetak is one artist featured in this playlist of radical, searching music by Kampela, himself a Brazilian composer and guitarist currently living in New York. These are intense sounds—our recommendation is […]
Posted inInterview
I’m Not Hiding Anything
Over the last four years, I’ve heard about half a dozen concerts of music by the composer Alvin Lucier in New York City. I have often begun listening to a piece with skepticism and left astonished. On March 25, Alvin Lucier will perform two of his works, “I Am Sitting in a Room” and “Vespers,” […]
Posted inInterview
Liquid Modernity
In his first book, Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 (University of California Press), Tim Rutherford-Johnson writes: “Searching for or describing unities in the present age, which is usually described as fragmentary, may be foolhardy. But as economic, political, and technological forces conspire to create a world that is more homogenous […]
Posted inReview
Music For The Thinking Ear
“Music for the thinking ear” is the slogan for Berlin’s new Pierre Boulez Saal, which opened its doors to the public on Saturday, March 4. Why a new hall? The city’s Philharmonie (Zirkus Karajani, or “Karajan’s Circus,” as West Berliners dubbed it) remains a monument to architectural, acoustic, and indeed performative modernism; there are no […]
Posted inOpinion
Maestro Monopolies
“Worthy gentleman, and my loving countrymen,” wrote the English lutist and composer John Dowland in the introduction to his 1612 song cycle “A Pilgrims Solace,” “I have been long obscured from your sight, because I received a Kingly entertainment in a foreign climate…Some part of my poore labours have found favour in the greatest part […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
March Bagatelles
Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional Costa Rica This campaign is supposed to get us in the mood for Summer Fun, but doesn’t it kind of look like everybody in these pictures is on the verge of drowning? Karajan I https://twitter.com/BerlinPhil/status/839499012675887104 On International Women’s Day, the Berlin Philharmonic decided to honor…Karajan. Karajan II https://twitter.com/KarajanMusic/status/839156972763107328 Who, if he was […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
Can New Music Be Sexy?
I wrote this from a multidisciplinary arts residency, which I have the good fortune to be attending. There are nine composers here hailing from different parts of the world, which means I’ve gotten to witness firsthand the process people go through when asked about sexiness in new music.The reaction has been quite consistent. Each time […]
Posted inInterview
Other Languages
Sometime in the 1780s, a low-ranked soldier of the Portuguese crown in Brazil named Joaquim José da Silva Xavier began a gradual process of political awakening. Later known as Tiradentes (“tooth-puller”), a derogatory term that referred to his past as an amateur dentist, he organized a group of citizens in a rebellion called the Inconfidência […]