Putting 50 pianos in a room creates a sense of occasion. On Saturday, I heard Georg Friedrich Haas’s “11.000 Saiten” (“11,000 Strings”), for 50 uprights tuned in ascending intervals of two cents and the contemporary music ensemble Klangforum Wien, at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. Although the piece premiered in August 2023 in Bolzano, Italy, […]
Monthly Archives: June 2024
Posted inPlaylist
Off-Site Eden
In his dazzling, fragmentary book A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes wrote, “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.” When I first encountered this analogy in my early 20s, I felt somehow relieved. I […]
Posted inProfile
epistle; possessive
I. At 12:27 on September 30, you wrote me three lines that read “Just caught TV glimpses of dreadful flooding in New York.Hope you are OK.M xx” I replied only much later, half-past, (you, surely asleep) My darling M,(Will I ever stop using that ‘my’?)— And though you didn’t know it—how could I have expected you […]
Posted inInterview
Fantasies, Urgencies
At Wigmore Hall in November, a solo piano recital by Vijay Iyer was like a set of rough clouds in a humid summer, breaking in brief, awesome moments. Hearing “Love in Exile” at the Barbican a few months earlier, the trio (Iyer, Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily) made a thick haze like a hot-warm drunkenness. […]
Posted inReport
“Let’s keep working.”
For weeks, Kharkiv and the surrounding region has been under regular bombardment, but May 23, the day I arrived in the city, was an especially tragic occasion for our festival, KharkivMusicFest. My train ride to Kharkiv from Chełm, southeast Poland, took almost 24 hours. The cars were crowded with passengers. In my compartment was a […]
Posted inProfile
Intuitive Refrains
“I want to build a new tradition, an aural tradition, transmitted via the ears,” Karlheinz Stockhausen declared in 1971. Such a tradition, he insisted, would avoid treating “the materials of music as separate from the process of composition” and would be “based on the direct experience of working with sounds rather than writing on paper.” […]
Posted inInterview
The Reverse Conductor
In 2022, I sang Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” at the Royal Albert Hall. During the performance a spotlit figure caught my eye, moving his hands dynamically and expressively with the musical flow, but who was neither a conductor, nor a singer, nor an instrumentalist. That figure was Paul Whittaker: a Deaf musician who uses British […]
Posted inInterview
“It’s A Gift to Be Simple”
When I first heard the music of Tom Johnson at a concert in Basel in 2013, I was immediately struck by its humor and unassuming simplicity. In contrast to the weighty works of the late 20th-century European avant-garde, Johnson’s music was a breath of fresh air. There were no hidden layers. It was transparent and […]
Posted inBreaking
Silent, Or Silenced?
A Freedom of Information request from VAN Magazine has revealed that Sir Nicholas Serota, the chair of Arts Council England, threatened to review a £3.2 million grant given to Welsh National Opera after the company’s music director wrote an open letter about the impact of Arts Council cuts on the organization. The letter, written by […]
Posted inEssay
Sounds Gay, I’m In
Thirty years ago, Queering the Pitch loosed one of the most powerful institutional revisions in musicology’s long and anxious history. Published in January of 1994, the book posed a forceful injunction to the field at large: Queerness—with all its social and political ramifications—could and would no longer be ignored by the ivied academies of Western […]