“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 […]
Category: Essay
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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 […]
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The Art of the Ideal
Can music change the world? That it can and does functions as a truism across many spheres of U.S. culture. Attali canonically argued that music, an element of what Marxists call the “superstructure,” can actually influence or foreshadow world-historical changes in the “base” of economic relations and production. The belief that music can change the […]
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A View from Emptiness
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 […]
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Bartók and Janáček At the End of Liberal Society
When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing, but a new order remained uncertain, two extraordinary musical works grappled with questions now central to our understanding of the 20th-century political catastrophe. Bartók’s “The Wooden Prince” (1914–16) and Janáček’s “Taras Bulba” (1915–18) help us understand the cultural and ideological forces that prepared the ground for totalitarianism and the end of liberal society […]
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“Something that has to do with … leaving … ”
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 […]