Some five years ago now, social media feeds went dark. In the bewildering first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, timelines filled with black squares to show solidarity with the global protests against racist police brutality. Such square-posters included the expected activists and signal boosters, but they also included major institutions of classical music like the […]
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Bodies in Orbit
Etsurō Sotoo arrived in Barcelona in 1978, a classically trained Japanese sculptor who became captivated by the Sagrada Família. He began working there as a stonecutter, and over time, the eccentricity he initially perceived in Gaudí’s forms gave way to a sense of coherence. What had once seemed merely decorative revealed itself as the outward expression of […]
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The Energy of the Moment
A train chugs along rhythmically, accompanied by otherworldly birds. Lazy chords blossom, like flowers from another world. A chaotic burbling morphs into an endless, glistening haze. These are just a few of the images conjured by “Escape Rites,” an album featuring several new works by JACK Quartet violinist Austin Wulliman. The works range from pensive […]
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This Body, Given (noli me tangere)
Let there be writing, not about the body, but the body itself. Not bodihood, but the actual body. Not signs, images, or ciphers of the body, but still the body. This was once a program for modernity, no doubt already it no longer is. —Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus She is known, absolutely—by her blue hair and […]
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History from the Bell Tower
The gargoyles wore beards of ice. Mary Clark noticed this detail through the early evening darkness as she pulled into a parking spot against the Cathedral close in January. The 82-year-old wondered how treacherous the sidewalks would be, particularly with the extra load of provisions she was carrying. The sandwiches and chips that she would […]
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James Smidt Checks His Watch
Dressed in a black and gold silk Versace loungewear set, with giant Louis Vuitton sunglasses sliding down the brim of his nose, James Smidt sipped his second Manhattan as we chatted at the rooftop bar of The Empire Hotel in Lincoln Center. I asked him to describe his own aesthetic. “Cunt. Tastemaker, epochal artistic mover […]
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The Last of the Kapellmeisters
“He who has no time must make time” is a Confucian maxim with dangerous implications for musicians. The line separating the moment of satisfaction from an expanse of respectable boredom is thin. And it’s different for everyone, informed by mood or previous experience. As I got on the bus at the Elbphilharmonie after a recent […]
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Befores and Afters
I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him. “I am alive. No, you are dead.”—Maurice Blanchot, “The Instant of My Death” When a poet puts off an old style… he or […]
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Heads Will Roll
We do not speak of horror. (Well, not in public, anyway.) It has been the tacit agreement of two generations of new music that cinematic horror is the forbidden aesthetic referent: a real and prevalent influence but one whose admittance is generally deemed more detrimental to the cause than worth its expository fruit. In private conversation, […]
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A Salvatore Sciarrino Playlist
“Anamorphosi” (1980) When the term anamorphosis appeared in the 17th century, it was used to describe a visual effect that had existed for some time but had not yet been given a technical name: by means of an optical transposition a form, not visible at first blush, becomes a readable image when perceived from a […]