“What if we did a playlist of 32 musical marches to tie in with March Madness?” asked one VAN editor who definitely understands sportsball and did not have to google how many teams are in a bracket (or when March Madness takes place). As classical-music-cartoonish as the idea sounded, it did get us thinking about […]
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A Metropolitan Opera Playlist
If you’d like to drive an ice-pick through your eye but are short on equipment, the New York Times comments section is often a good virtual substitute. Case in point: The 700-plus responses to the paper’s coverage of the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to focus future seasons on more new works and living composers, citing sold-out […]
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A “Winterreise” All-Stars Playlist
I came here as a stranger. Actually, no: I was very familiar with “Winterreise” before this latest exploration. But, after listening to 75 recordings of the work in quick succession, I’m beginning to question whether I really knew “Winterreise” before now. While the winter solstice is behind us and days are now officially getting longer, […]
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An Actually Erotic Classical Music for Sex Playlist
Early this fall, I asked friends to tell me which pieces of classical music they believed to be “the all-time sexiest.” I promised there were no wrong answers. I wasn’t being disingenuous—though I was thinking about how erotic classical music playlists on Spotify and elsewhere, if not “wrong” or “bad,” are full of famous pieces […]
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An English National Opera playlist
English National Opera: Coming to an as-yet-undisclosed location near you. Arts Council England’s decision to strip ENO of its subsidy in the latest round of funding has been a shock to the arts ecosystem in the UK. As Hugh Morris wrote in VAN last week, the approach of ACE appears to be: Fuck around and […]
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A Dynamical Systems Playlist
A dynamical system is a system whose state evolves with time over a state space according to a fixed rule. A dynamical system is all about the evolution of something over time. To create a dynamical system we simply need to decide (1), what is the “something” that will evolve over time and (2), what is the rule […]
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A Dark Academia Playlist
I hadn’t heard of Dark Academia—a subculture born on Tumblr that soon migrated to Instagram and TikTok—until sometime last year when I suddenly started seeing posts about Donna Tartt’s The Secret History everywhere. One of my favorite books, I was surprised to see it now become the basis of memes, outfits of the day, playlists, […]
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An Iannis Xenakis Playlist
This year marks the centenary of Iannis Xenakis, the Romanian-born Greek-French composer who died in 2001. Architect, mathematician, communist, and composer of both instrumental and electronic works, his music plowed an idiosyncratic furrow in the history of the European avant-garde. The centenary has happily meant retrospectives of his work. The most substantial was Révolutions Xenakis […]
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An Autumn Equinox Playlist
I’m not here to shit all over Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” but I do believe that the Venn Diagram between people who consider the composer’s “Autumn” to be the epitome of fall-inspired classical music and people whose image of autumn stops at Pumpkin Spice Lattes and rewatches of “Hocus Pocus” is a circle. On the eve […]
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A Theater of Music Playlist
You walk on stage, and it’s terrifying: senior-recital-gone-wrong, late-to-a-masterclass-with-Big-Name-Soloist, career-ending-farce-with-your-parents-in-the-audience terrifying. As always, it’s inexplicably hot on the boards (or too cold, or the lights are too bright) and you’re sure the audience can see the sweat glisten on your frustrated, unhappy face. You’re flubbing notes left and right, barreling through an old favorite, lilting […]