In a brown tracksuit top and wired headphones, with ponytails split in her signature style, Maddie Ashman looked stylistically out of joint around the corporate suits rushing to grab lunch around King’s Cross—more Central Saint Martins than Google HQ. Chatty and amiable, she told me she had just under an hour before her next meeting. […]
Category: Profile
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The Temperature of Time
I first met the composer Wang Lu on a warm weekend in south Brooklyn in the spring of 2008. The International Contemporary Ensemble, where I’m a pianist and original member, was about to premiere her “Siren Song.” It was by far the craziest-sounding piece on the program. “This one is beyond the beyond,” I said […]
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On the Bridge to Forever
You may find yourself at Lincoln Center. You may find yourself sitting in the Wu Tsai Theater inside David Geffen Hall, where the New York Philharmonic plays. You may find yourself seeing 100 musicians, each with an electric guitar in hand, coming on stage, then playing together to produce massive, rolling waves of sound. And […]
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The Body That Carries
Aïda Nosrat’s “Common Routes” sounds, at first, like a record about travel. It takes several listenings to fix its geometry: The accordion is French, the guitar idiom is Manouche, the groove absorbed from Burkina Faso. Nosrat’s voice moves through all of it with an ease that suggests she has been waiting for these specific interlocutors […]
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What’s Left to Do
In January, Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe realized he’d been overdoing it. In February, he had a health scare—a false alarm, but one that nonetheless prompted him to book time off and reevaluate his working habits. For almost a decade now, he has been the definition of an artist in a hurry, releasing nine albums since 2017 (counting “Vesper,” […]
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The Sensations of Disconnection
It was a rainy afternoon in an autumnal London as conductor-composer Jack Sheen tuned the quietude of Gerard Grisey’s “Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil.” The performers, the London Sinfonietta and soprano Nina Guo, were receptive as he worked with them to uncover hidden acoustic relationships, finding sounds that were at once full and soft, […]
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The Transcriber
Donde menos se piensa, salta la liebre—where you least expect it, the hare leaps. Sancho Panza’s proverb from the Second Part of Don Quijote conveys the suddenness with which insight can arrive. The hare leapt for me while reading Lydia Davis’s essay “Demanding Pleasures: On the Art of Observation” in Harper’s. Responding to the perennial […]
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Confluence
“Into the Night,” a new work for sitar, Indian classical ensemble and orchestra by sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun, begins with a nocturnal luminescence. Warm shimmering string tremolos give a harmonic foundation, over which a sitar melody blooms with bright, undulating streams of notes. These solo melodies become energetic dialogues. The esraj (a bowed […]
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The Tomb or the Mouth
Dead or alive, neither dead nor alive, I am the opening, the tomb or the mouth, the one inside the other. —Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus pre-face Difficulties: with that word. How to read it? Two options. The first and most obvious suggestion is of a sustained consideration, long overdue, to the knotty, the many, and the […]
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Resistance & Vision
Resistance always resists more or less well, first of all against itself, more or less powerfully. And more is less here. A resistance is never simple, and might is always a play of resistances with an intensity differential. —Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That is to Say… If there was no resistance, there would be […]