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 […]
Category: Essay
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
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. […]
Posted inEssay
Energy and Attention
They’re tapping you thrice on the shoulder, sneering and full of disdain. Look out: It’s the etiquette police! Etiquette can be the trivial stuff of lace doilies and debutante balls, but it is also laced with the potential to oppress. Shared etiquette can set us on equal footing with one another, while imposed and restrictive […]
Posted inEssay
Fall In Love Again and Again
It is no exaggeration to say that Antonio Vivaldi’s baroque masterpiece “The Four Seasons” changed the course of my life. Vivaldi’s monumental homage to the natural world is a work resplendent with fantasy, storytelling, tunes one can hum after a single listen, and particularly exquisite writing for the violin. Ostensibly a vehicle to show off […]
Posted inEssay
Seven Lives
I often think about the life Sibelius led in his remote villa of Ainola. He had stopped traveling to his favorite cities—Berlin, Vienna and London—and must have felt quite lonely and isolated. Perhaps part of the reason he burned his Eighth Symphony was that he didn’t feel connected to the new modernistic trends in Europe. […]
Posted inEssay
Bronze Age Pervert’s Guide to Music
One day in 1999, a decade after the “new” musicology was really new, and at the tail end of the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s, I was an 18-year-old freshman and wannabe musicologist attending a job talk for a new hire in the musicology department at my undergraduate institution. A female candidate presented her […]