With Trump’s tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue and combat-fatigued foot soldiers guarding masked ICE agents in Los Angeles, who’s listening to “Appalachian Spring”? How does Aaron Copland’s World War II-era patriotic evocation of the American pastoral strike our ears in an era of xenophobic, gun-toting vigilantism, when small towns are propagandized as the last stand […]
Author Archives: G. Samantha Rosenthal
… is an independent journalist and award-winning author based in Virginia. Her most recent book is Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City.
Posted inPlaylist
A Wendy Carlos Playlist
At 85, Wendy Carlos remains an enigmatic figure in the world of classical music. Intensely private, she has not granted an interview request in over 15 years. When the first book-length treatment of her life and work was published in 2020— without her consent—Carlos trashed it on her personal website, calling it “mean-spirited” and “presumptuous,” […]
Posted inEssay
The Delirious Dance
After eight minutes of agitated, highly rhythmic vamping, the left hand and the right hand jockeying for space on the keyboard, the repetition of a D key so many times that most other pianists would have developed rapid-onset carpal tunnel syndrome, Keith Jarrett finally lets go. We hear an exhale. Now turning to stately, spaced-out […]