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, […]
Category: Essay
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]