“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. […]
Category: Essay
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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 […]
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Thin Fire
Not long ago, I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. One line stayed with me: “Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—‘Chloe liked Olivia. . .’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes […]
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Two Siegmunds, Two Wälses
After writing 9,000 words on the “Ring” cycle, I thought that maybe I’d finally be done thinking about it. For a while, I was. Then, after what would be a two-month break in my obsession, I decided to return to something I wanted to write about at the time but never got to. During the […]
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Unwind, Unwound
Taken to orchestral concerts as a child, I was restless. The complexity and vast architectures of a typical Romantic symphony made me think of the music as some fractal maze, wholly illegible in its ever-shifting textures and bombastic pronouncements of brass-laden grandeur. It felt like sound and fury signifying nothing. Then came the slow movement. […]
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They Toll For Thee
Bells call people to pray, to mourn, to marry. They pass them news of war, peace, fire, and flood. On a sweltering August afternoon in London, they summoned me to the Royal Albert Hall. That night’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 from The Hallé at the BBC Proms was partly special because it was […]