I. Overture AI is the buzzword. Those little magic stars that pop up in every app, the sunlit uplands of a less laborious future, they are virtually everywhere—and are changing how we think about creativity. AI is a hyperobject, a symbol that refers to a wide range of practices, software and intentions across time and […]
Category: Opinion
Posted inOpinion
Trump: The Opera
The performing arts field tends to move slowly; Donald Trump does not. Last Friday, he announced that he would be taking over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.; by Monday, he had dismissed a number of board members and installed a new interim executive director, Richard Grenell; and on Wednesday, he […]
Posted inOpinion
An Expansion of the Project
Artificial intelligence may be able to mimic emotion, but it cannot feel it. It may be able to research the context in which it exists, but it doesn’t know it. AI is based on algorithms, patterns and imitation, so how can it possess creativity? Well, it can’t. But, by embracing what it can do—patterns, pastiches, […]
Posted inOpinion
Your Tiny Hand Is Invisible
Last week, English National Opera’s plans for Greater Manchester were unveiled in the Holden Gallery of Manchester Metropolitan University. The room was filled with many of the city region’s most powerful players. Sir Richard Leese, the former council leader who oversaw Manchester’s rapid regeneration after the IRA bombing in 1996, received a shoutout from the […]
Posted inOpinion
Classical Music in the Enshittocene
I guess the moment it hit me was when Classic FM’s Alexander Armstrong was revealed to be getting into “NFTs tickets.” Whether or not these NFTs are just glorified QR codes—Curved Music, the company behind his new shows, didn’t respond by the time of publication—mere mention of those initials was enough to zap me back […]
Posted inOpinion
She’s a Witch!
Alma Mahler was a witty socialite with an appetite for sex and an eye for talent. By early adulthood, she had become a prolific composer. More than anything, she aspired to be Great, with a capital G. But Alma’s claim to fame, so eloquently outlined in her obituaries, is the long list of geniuses with […]
Posted inOpinion
The Case for a New Music Theater
I. “You Want to Stop Listening” 1996, Bregenz Festival. The semi-staged world premiere of my opera “Nacht” on texts by Friedrich Hölderlin. The journalist Reinhard Kager predicted that the work would have a great future. Looking back, I understand why. Thanks to the spare scenic means (different plot strands were illuminated using different kinds of […]
Posted inOpinion
Argumentum Ad Antiquitatem
In 1998, The New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett predicted with remarkable prescience the future creations of Wynton Marsalis. Following “Blood on the Fields,” Marsalis’s jazz oratorio which, to Balliett’s surprise, won a Pulitzer Prize for Music that year, he wondered what might be next for the trumpeter and composer: “Perhaps Marsalis will write a […]
Posted inOpinion
On and Off the Menu
No, I didn’t attend any of the 11 concerts—four orchestral and seven chamber music—given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra during its residency in Shanghai at the end of June. Dubbed the orchestra’s “first residency” in China by the press and the China Shanghai International Arts Festival (CSIAF) which hosted the orchestra, around 135 musicians and […]
Posted inOpinion
John McWhorter Has Nothing to Say (And He’s Saying It)
“Everybody’s so angry right now that nobody can listen or talk to anybody else,” Salman Rushdie said earlier this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. “And what’s more, we also believe that being offended is a sufficient reason for attacking something.… And if you go down that road, then we can’t talk to each […]