I. It opens mid-motion, as if caught unraveling. A noise, brisk and grained, emerges from the second violin, bow hairs pressed against string. Col legno: The cello draws the wooden back of the bow upward and then down—a rustle makes itself heard and is gone. Now the second violin traces light, oblique arcs, upward, then […]
Author Archives: Kyle Bijan Rosen
… lives in Barcelona, Spain. He recently graduated from UCLA with a Ph.D. in German Poetry and Philosophy.
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 inProfile
The Transcriber
Donde menos se piensa, salta la liebre—where you least expect it, the hare leaps. Sancho Panza’s proverb from the Second Part of Don Quijote conveys the suddenness with which insight can arrive. The hare leapt for me while reading Lydia Davis’s essay “Demanding Pleasures: On the Art of Observation” in Harper’s. Responding to the perennial […]
Posted inReview
Strength in Absence
In late September 1940, a month after negotiations between the French and German governments dissolved the Third Republic and established the Vichy regime under Marshal Pétain, Walter Benjamin found himself a refugee with dim prospects for legal exit from France. The German-Jewish man of letters boarded a train from Marseilles toward the Spanish border with […]
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Bodies in Orbit
Etsurō Sotoo arrived in Barcelona in 1978, a classically trained Japanese sculptor who became captivated by the Sagrada Família. He began working there as a stonecutter, and over time, the eccentricity he initially perceived in Gaudí’s forms gave way to a sense of coherence. What had once seemed merely decorative revealed itself as the outward expression of […]
Posted inHistory
An Encounter with Distance
Pau Casals wrote letters as he played the cello: with conviction and exacting care. An epistolophile to the core, he wove a web of correspondences through what Eric Hobsbawm called the “short 20th century,” an era of war and upheaval that shattered the 19th century’s bourgeois order. His letters, exchanged with a fluid cast of […]
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A Salvatore Sciarrino Playlist
“Anamorphosi” (1980) When the term anamorphosis appeared in the 17th century, it was used to describe a visual effect that had existed for some time but had not yet been given a technical name: by means of an optical transposition a form, not visible at first blush, becomes a readable image when perceived from a […]
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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 inEssay
Sweet Fingers
If Morteza Mahjoubi’s pianism is alive today, it is not out of devotion or praise for his person, but rather on account of something internal to his virtuosity: a sublime rubato that penetrates beneath the level of surface and releases melodies that cultivate and nourish the soul. Mahjoubi’s tone is so striking, its kinship to […]