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 […]
Category: Essay
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 […]
Posted inEssay
The Post-Election Hand of Fellowship
In the weeks before the 2024 U.S. election, when my Trump anxiety kept me from sleeping or focusing, the only thing I found solace in was an academic book of musicology. If I had encountered Samantha Ege’s South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene at any other time, I would have […]
Posted inEssay
In Row Five
“The chief conductor’s scores are locked away in this cabinet down here on the left,” the Phil archivist is telling me. “It’s reserved for the chief conductor’s scores. Please don’t touch or change anything. Basically, mitts off, alright?” I take notes. “Furtwängler is here in the front to the right, Karajan’s in the second section.” […]
Posted inEssay
The Book of Hours
Twentieth-century physics expanded our sense of subatomic and cosmological scales, opening up musical time and space in the process. Modernism is full of the complex dance between “large” and “small.” It includes the encyclopedic gigantism of works like Mahler’s Symphony No.8, Havergal Brian’s “Gothic” Symphony, or Alexander Scriabin’s “Mysterium.” The latter, an unperformed and unperformable […]
Posted inEssay
Even and Perverse
Suburban New Jersey, 1991. My parents’ record collection contained a disc from the 1950s of Charles Ives’s chamber pieces and songs—surely one of the first recordings made of this astonishing composer’s work. From that entire memorable LP, which I played virtually on repeat, one track stood out: “The Pond,” for voice and chamber orchestra. The […]
Posted inEssay
Rough, Tender, Yielding
In England, the summer country house opera season is winding up. Dinner jackets fly south to the dry cleaner; wicker picnic hampers bed down to hibernate until the spring. Although there are summer opera festivals all over the world, the country house phenomenon is almost unique to the British: few other countries give such primacy […]
Posted inEssay
Me and Ruth in Berlin
In 1930, Ruth Crawford went to Berlin. Nearly a century ago, she was a few years younger than I am now. I imagine a young American woman deeply intrigued (intimidated?) by her European contemporaries and eager to feel “the scene” under her feet. I can relate. In a 2017 New York Times portrait, William Robin […]