I’ve long accepted the fact that I am one of tens of thousands of people who suffer from Wagner derangement syndrome. Many people listen to or watch the works of Wagner, but only an errant few become lifers. Given the sheer baggage of Wagner and the irksome coincidence of our shared surname, this is, of […]
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A Scene Through The Screen
Settling into my seat—a leftover single seat between two couples in a row of five in the top balcony—I look down on the Polaroid-shaped frame of the Metropolitan Opera stage. The sight is familiar. I’ve seen the upright rectangle of the stage, the bursting chandeliers, and the deep red of the auditorium seats many times […]
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God’s Time
On a frozen evening in Silesia in January 1941, a young French composer, along with three other prisoners of war, performed an hour-long, eight-movement work for piano, cello, violin and clarinet to a rapt audience. “From the moment I read the back-of-an-album summary…the story of the premiere was inseparable from the music,” Michael Symmons Roberts […]
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Sitting Down, Standing Up
His very first composition journal is dated 1983, one year after completing his university studies in Vienna and so the first year he could properly consider himself a composer. Peter Ablinger was forever putting things in varying piles and compartments, time and space very much included. “Sometimes I think I might have been an archivist […]
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The Delirious Dance
After eight minutes of agitated, highly rhythmic vamping, the left hand and the right hand jockeying for space on the keyboard, the repetition of a D key so many times that most other pianists would have developed rapid-onset carpal tunnel syndrome, Keith Jarrett finally lets go. We hear an exhale. Now turning to stately, spaced-out […]
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13 Ways of Looking at “Sheep May Safely Graze”
I: A NON SEQUITUR It’s March, and the wind is whirling, swaying oaks and hickories in the park where I’ve brought my five-year-old son to play. Dashiell picks up a fallen tree branch from the grass and makes it his staff. Today he is a shepherd, guiding me along paths that bend around a man-made […]
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The Sounds of Smiling
When I’m anxious, I calm myself by listening to Satie’s “Gymnopedies.” When I’m looking to focus, I turn on András Schiff’s rendition of “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” Lately, I’ve been looking to escape the tumult of life in Trump’s America—can it only be April?—longing for a simpler time. And so I’ve found my way back to […]
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The Sacral End
Strange and uneasy, her relation to new music, and in hindsight only growing ever more so. Which is not to say Sofia Gubaidulina did not belong to the field: she carried excellent early modernist credentials handed on from 1950s Moscow, having earned herself a censorship from the Kremlin and, in 1992, the requisite flight into […]
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Between the Sky and the Earth
A house not in the sky and not on earth(Čardak ni na nebu ni na zemlji) A country not in the east and not in the west It is important when writing, they say, to state three facts at the very beginning. It establishes trust and allows connection. I will start with three lies. My […]
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Heart of Glass
In “Maria,” a sad, nosy, seedy film in which Maria Callas dies once again, banalities appear dressed as aphorisms. “Happiness never produced a beautiful melody,” she tells Mandrax, her journalist-cum-hallucinogen. When her obliging footman Ferruccio asks what she has taken—the film obsesses about Callas’s pills—she floats back a response: “I took liberties all my life. […]