Ever since I started my new teaching job as a music lecturer at Sapir College in the south of Israel, I’d had the itch to drive at the end of the day and watch the sunset—a beautiful desert sunset, with its giant red orb glowing in a light that is particular to the Negev district. […]
Category: Essay
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Ringling and Riots
A Dispatch from Sarasota, Florida Text and Photography · Date 12/15/2016 I was dumbfounded by the spectacular opulence of my surroundings. This was Cà d’Zan, the first venue of my “Overtures to Bach” series at the Ringling International Arts Festival in Sarasota, Florida, and once John and Mable Ringling’s beloved winter palace; a gilded mansion […]
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The Savior’s Gaze
Forgiveness in Janáček’s “Jenůfa” By · Title Image Anonymous English painter (PD) · Date 12/15/2016 Upon hearing her own stepmother the Kostelnička guiltily admit that she was the one who killed her infant child—whose frozen corpse the people of the Moravian village have now discovered—Jenůfa, initially shocked and appalled, first orders her to “stand up.” […]
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Flattened Multiplicities
On Musical Genre and Personal Identity By · Illustrations Christian Gwiozda (CC) · Date 12/1/2016 In the very first episode of the critically acclaimed ESPN documentary “OJ: Made in America,” the sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards contemplates OJ’s racial self-distinction during his college days in the 1960s. OJ thought he should be “judged not by the […]
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A Perfect Surface
I hope I play the piece better than last time. Oh, there’s the music critic. His most recent review of me said I was overrated and oversold. Also, this is going to be on live radio. If I make a mistake, about 3 billion people will hear it. It wouldn’t be the first time. In […]
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Notes Towards A Movement
On November 24, 1963, two days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein conducted Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the New York Philharmonic on a nationally televised memorial to the slain president. Three days later, Bernstein spoke before an audience of 18,000 at Madison Square Garden, where he delivered his famous words: “This […]
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A Brief Guide to Mozart x Salieri Slash
Salieri has developed a habit of stealing Mozart’s scores. He looks at them in private, then puts them back the next day. One night Salieri attends an underground party and watches as Mozart ties up a woman. He feels a deep charge of erotic energy; he can’t sleep. Mozart confronts Salieri about the score-stealing, teasing. […]
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Dark Ocean
“We aren’t supposed to drink on the bus, but I brought beer!” After a full day of rehearsals and a concert in Copenhagen, the musicians of the Baltic Sea Philharmonic were on the road to Sønderborg, a town straddling the main Danish peninsula and the island of Als. It was halfway through their Baltic Sea […]
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Crocodiles and Collio
A Dispatch from Cormons, Italy By · Photography Courtesy of Matt Haimovitz · Date 09/08/2016 Around his rustic country table in Cormons, Italy, Kristian Keber, a 28-year-old winemaker, poured his family’s 2013 Collio. Perhaps Kristian could sense that my mind was racing for adjectives and metaphors to describe the chilled white wine swirling in the […]
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Mezzo-sopranos from Outer Space
Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices” By · Title Image NYPL (PD) · Date 08/04/2016 In 2015, the writer Lisa Bolekaja published a short story in Uncanny, a magazine for science fiction and fantasy, called “Three Voices,” inspired by the Morton Feldman piece of the same name. At the climax, a vocalist’s skin pigmentation drains from her […]