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 […]
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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.” […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Sounds Gay, I’m In
Thirty years ago, Queering the Pitch loosed one of the most powerful institutional revisions in musicology’s long and anxious history. Published in January of 1994, the book posed a forceful injunction to the field at large: Queerness—with all its social and political ramifications—could and would no longer be ignored by the ivied academies of Western […]
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Opera At the End of the Earth
Can you name a monumental four-opera series that brings together an extended, related cast of characters involved in mysterious and spiritual quests? How about a Great American Novel? Now, how about an artist who created both? The answer is the great American composer Robert Ashley, who died in 2014 just shy of his 84th birthday, […]
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It Could Be Me
The curtain opens on Mozart’s “La clemenza di Tito.” On stage is a raging Vitellia: wannabe empress, scorned daughter, forgotten royalty. “He could have at least chosen a rival worthy of me,” she spits, of reigning emperor Tito. “Instead, he prefers a barbarian and an exile to me, a queen!” Vitellia’s father was the emperor […]
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Kafka’s Coloratura
To read Franz Kafka’s last short story “Josephine, the Songstress or The Mouse Folk” is to recognize the reflection better the dirtier the glass. The subject of the story is an artist and the creatures in whose midst she makes her art. Her name is Josephine. She is a singer. Or is she? Josephine’s folk […]