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 […]
Category: Essay
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My Affair with Robert Wilson
Performance Art Valhalla The first opera I ever saw was the entire “Ring,” which lasts some 15 hours over four days. This was the 1980 Centennial Ring, or Jahrhundertring, marking 100 years since the world premiere of the cycle, which opened the newly built Festspielhaus in 1876. I was fresh out of grad school, living […]
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Edvard Grieg, Aura Farmer
On the approach to Troldhaugen, a straight, wide avenue splits into spaghetti paths: down to the shoreside grave, up to the villa, left to the glass-fronted concert hall, and further left to the composing hut. Tracing each route is like walking through a video game landscape. This is World of Grieg, a place where footsteps […]
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New Masters
On Monday, Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas.” It sets out his vision for how we can best harness artificial intelligence without stripping away human dignity. Warning against “the construction of yet another Tower of Babel” and the dangers of standardization and the concentration of power, he insists technology cannot be human. […]
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Perceptual Astronomy
Fifty years ago, the American composer Maryanne Amacher set about the creation of a major new work: not a symphony or a string quartet, but a TV series. Originally titled “Sound Saga,” the piece, even at this early stage, was already remarkably—perhaps unprecedentedly—elaborate. The plot was based on Arthur C. Clarke’s baroque far-future space opera […]
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Inside the Sound of the Swarm
“The granular dimension of time is the secret to bug music. I don’t just mean the music bugs make, but something wider and deeper, the ‘bug music’ aspect of life, or the bug and the glitch hiding inside all music.”—David Rothenberg The peripatetic, protosurrealist writer and translator Lafcadio Hearn had a severe case of myopia. […]
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Incoherence and Indignity in the Classic FM Hall of Fame
“The radio announcer for Classic FM informs his audience that Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’ has landed, by popular vote, the number one spot in the station’s classical ‘Hall of Fame.’ The background is established: that Vaughan Williams is widely understood – sometimes loved, sometimes loathed for it – as the greatest representative, even as […]
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Mozart as Snake Oil
It was the year 2009, and the Walt Disney Company was refunding DVDs because they did not make customers’ children geniuses. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Baby Einstein LLC’s educational videos were a juggernaut of American child-rearing. The company’s VHS tapes and DVDs like “Baby Bach” and “Baby Mozart” consisted of soothing videos […]
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What Remains Behind
It started with a feeling, not in the ear, but in the gut. Music had always been an intensely corporeal experience for me. When I listened, and especially when I played, the sound only seemed to start in my ears before making my whole body vibrate in sympathy. It felt as though there were reverberant […]
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A Matter of Perspective
Recently, the world of classical music was rocked by the spectacular discovery of new works by two major composers. In 2024, scholars discovered a Serenade in C, soon nicknamed “A Very Little Night Music,” by Mozart. The little composition, written when he was about 12 years old, was found in a library in Leipzig: About […]