Between the winter of 1950–51, when he began mapping out a series of “Projections” in squares on graph paper, and the attenuating final breath of “Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello” in 1987, there were fewer than 37 years. Between then and the centenary that falls on January 12 this year, there have been 39. We have […]
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Listening to Classical Music in Recovery
Long before I became addicted to—or had even tasted—alcohol, I was hooked on music. Ever since discovering classical music’s mood-altering effects at the age of ten, while listening to the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s “Requiem,” I had abused it like a hardened junkie, turning to it constantly to regulate moods over which I had increasingly little […]
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Music From the Inside of the Sun
Last winter, Georg Friedrich Haas mentioned to me that the composer Arash Yazdani, a former student of his and a friend of mine, had given him a word he’d been looking for his entire career. That term is “plasmatic music.” I’ll let the two artists define the term in the correspondence below, which covers that […]
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Eccentric Physics
Set and Setting It was Wednesday, early October. I had borrowed a friend’s kitchen to make 100 servings of strudel for my six-year-old son’s school event, and I was listening to John Cage’s “Music of Changes,” which takes form through chance operations and the wisdom of the I Ching. Earlier in the morning, I’d made […]
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The Last Romantic
“Guero” for piano Soft, almost imperceptible sounds for minutes. In concert, the work has a paradoxical effect: What we see is the traditional virtuoso performance situation. What we hear is a microcosm of perforated percussion sounds in quadruple pianissimo. And then, at the very end: Two different strings in the high register are softly plucked. […]
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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, […]
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Classical Music’s Weirdest Popularizer
Have you ever wondered what Richard Wagner would have looked like in a superhero costume? Or how Ursula Vaughan Williams jived on the dancefloor? Or how good Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was in bed? Fifty years ago this month, Ken Russell’s “Lisztomania” was premiered in London. In this film, the most outrageous of the 12 pictures the […]
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Gap Trap Laugh, Part II
PART II VI.Shimmering Ontology / (Laugh) Struck by the apparition, she burst out laughing. The laughter of childbirth.—Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils Kundry’s primal scene—the instant of her transformation into the figure of the eternal feminine pariah—takes place at the base of the cross: having laughed at the body of Christ, she endures as […]
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Gap Trap Laugh
for Seth Brodsky PART I: STRANGE THINGS I. getting it just right Every act of reading is a difficult transaction between the competence of the reader (the reader’s world knowledge) and the kind of competence that a given text postulates in order to be read in an economic way.—Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation All artists play […]
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The Disappearing Monument
It is easy to believe in the permanence of sound. Now every recording can be streamed and repeated on demand without degradation; files replicate flawlessly; loops repeat without wear; digital archives expand infinitely. Music appears inexhaustible as technology promises security against erosion—like nothing goes away. William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops,” receiving a deluxe reissue in […]