for Andy Kozar At every desk I’ve ever owned has hung a framed copy of a piece—just a single page, really, 19 bars, no more—from the “Játékok” by György Kurtág. It is yellowed now, slightly crinkled in a number of places, and marginally off-center (the product of a fall some years ago that I never […]
Category: Essay
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In Art’s Company
Maria Kalesnikava, the flutist, conductor, arts manager, and activist, was one of the leading figures of the 2020 pro-democracy movement in Belarus. After her arrest in September 2020, she spent five years under arrest, held as a political prisoner. In December 2025, she was released as part of negotiations between the United States and Belarus, […]
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In Defense of the Program Note
On his first visit to London in 1851, Hector Berlioz attended several chamber music concerts at The Musical Union, a subscription series run by impresario John Ella. His dispatches from the city were effusive: “The London public is very attentive and serious in its tastes and I have been able to see for myself its […]
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Hall (Liza Lim’s “The Tailor of Time”)
Let me tell you a story. No, let me show you one. No, again: let me sew you one. So you won, says the boy to the ocean who laps at his castle of sand; never mind, I will build it again. So they dance, this pair of unlikeliest lovers, always different and every time […]
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Booth (Richard Barrett’s “elsewhen”)
There is a phrase in new music—the colloquial kind, one of those oral indexes traded among colleagues in post-show chatter and off-hand remarking, a shorthand signifier loosely comprehensible but sparingly specific—that goes: “This is a music that teaches you how to listen to it.” Implied in the phrase, though never said outright, is a patience […]
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Church (Liza Lim’s “The Oresteia”)
1987 was a somewhat innocuous year for new music. Neither Orwell nor the Berlin Wall, it straddled the change-years, when the high-rollers of ‘60s and ‘70s European music slowed, gradually uncovering a younger, less stodgy, more disseminated and global avant-garde. Europe as an idea—though it wasn’t sure how yet—was under considerable revision, and the aesthetics […]
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ELISION Dossier
If I say it’s an experiment, you might think me overeager to abdicate on certitude’s authority. So I won’t say that. What I will say is that a report seemed inadequate to the scale of what took place. ELISION Ensemble—Australia’s premiere new music group, ranking members alongside Austria’s Klangforum Wien, Germany’s MusikFabrik, and France’s Ensemble […]
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Bar (ELISION Ensemble at 40)
It’s been 40 years of counting tuplets together; at this point, Daryl Buckley and Peter Neville just talk over one another. Constantly. The conversation looks and feels something like this: So how did the two of you come to know each other? Neville: “Well, we met at VCA!” Buckley: “Yep, right.” “And was that in […]
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Drawer (Archive)
As if the uphill battle ELISION faced was ever in doubt, two reviews from the first concert on a small New Music festival in Melbourne in October of 1986, on which Daryl Buckley played Milton Babbitt’s “Composition for Guitar.” Neither reviewer is much impressed with the work, a reminder of how far New Music criticism […]
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Infinite Wagner
Here is a battered sneaker box, tennis-court green. Inside of it are cassette tapes, their cases smudged and cloudy. Outside of it is a room in a second-floor apartment in Somerville, near Boston. Maybe there’s a desk here, with a spilling box of books beside it. Notebooks strewn about. A gray boombox nearby. And a […]