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 […]
Author Archives: Ty Bouque
… writes about opera: its slippery histories, its sensual bodies, and the work of mourning for a dead genre. Elsewhere, Bouque sings in various solo, ensemble, and opera configurations around the world. Bouque lives in Chicago.
Posted inReview
A Chance to Mourn
All eyes have been on Detroit in recent years, where Yuval Sharon’s much-profiled tenure at the rebranded Detroit Opera has turned into a case study for new models of opera’s cultural relevance in regional America. News outlets and commentators have been generous in covering his stewardship, highlighting Sharon’s audaciously modern programming and unorthodox concepts—not to […]
Posted inReview
29,313; or, where the archive ends
I. I had come to Munich searching for an archive I wasn’t sure was there. This was several years ago now, back when I was still fumbling toward a book on post-war opera—something about its relation to genre, history, and mourning; the sketches are still tucked in a drawer somewhere—and at the time, Munich was […]
Posted inProfile
The Things We Form
It is afternoon in Berlin. Sarah Saviet is not meant to be here. She is meant to be hiking, unreachable in the woods in Spain, but, change of plans, she’s here, playing Bach: in her living room, an afternoon in Berlin. And so we meet. We talk, and we do not cover everything. She is […]
Posted inProfile
A Lovers’ Discourse
Evan Johnson is a composer; he thinks about sound. But Evan Johnson is also the rare composer who thinks just as much about sight. It’s true that, to the ear, his music is often extremely affecting in its tightrope delicacy, but that aural richness is only a happy consequence of an opulent visual field: his […]
Posted inProfile
The Threshold of Change
Juliet Fraser is on sabbatical. “Actually,” she corrects me, “it’s a semi-sabbatical”—she’s still performing, but only sparingly. Mostly, she’s taking some long-overdue time to breathe, and to devote more attention to her other spinning plates. (She keeps several in the air, no matter the season.) When I call her early on a Friday morning, she […]
Posted inInterview
Spit On Me
Steven Takasugi’s Piano Concerto will be premiered by Roger Admiral, Ingo Metzmacher, and the SWR Symphonieorchester in collaboration with the SWR Experimentalstudio on October 22. It will be the final work of the 2023 Donaueschingen Music Days, a festival for contemporary music in southwestern Germany. The following texts were extracted from an interview held at […]
Posted inEssay
Hopelessly Devoted
Paul and I say our goodbyes in the dingy half-light of a Berlin bar. His fastidious punctuality has given way to a soft fatigue brought on by the end of long night’s work, but his professional guard remains firmly in place. The hug is cordial, measured in its familiarity. We ask one another the unobtrusive […]
Posted inOpinion
The Problem with Peter
Rain is hardly a deterrent in Paris. It’s opening night for a new staging of the John Adams warhorse “Nixon in China,” and the imposing stone walls of the Opéra Bastille are framed by a quickly-brewing storm. Under trickling March skies, the house bears an uncanny resemblance to the military stronghold from which it gets […]
Posted inEssay
How to Measure Love
New music mourns with a strange and violent passion. Each announcement of the death of a major composer sparks a river of public grief that is always torrential at its mouth—floods of tributes, letters, anecdotes, love notes, lessons, all offered in the reification of the dead. In the days that follow, the artist’s work receives […]