Saturday night in one of Europe’s big cities, and concertgoers pour out of underground stations and cabs, tickets and programs in hand, dressed to the nines—a star-spangled cavalcade of cultural exchange and high-brow entertainment. Some will trace what they hear with prepared anticipation, some might not know what will be played at all, but all […]
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Fertile Ground
The grass is always greener on the other side of the Atlantic. Throughout my time in the world of contemporary classical music, this is a message I have heard over and over and over again. Governments in Europe fund their artists much more generously. European audiences are much more invested in their artistic cultures, and […]
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Ritual Time
When people bring up the rituals of the classical concert hall, it usually isn’t to celebrate them. Countless blog posts, newspaper columns, and tweets have criticized the unspoken formalized rules of such performances—especially rules about when it is appropriate to clap—for being barriers to new listeners not already steeped in the culture. Whatever the merit […]
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Alchemy
The audience had to creep carefully around the performance space, as a constellation of strings were stretched at hip-height from one wall to another. Ellen Fullman had spent the day here, setting up her traveling installation, the Long String Instrument; she had stretched dozens of stainless steel and phosphor bronze strings across the room in […]
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Anonymous Man
Shortly after 10 a.m. on the morning of Monday April 24, 1865, a ferry set out across the Hudson River from a landing in Jersey City. Bedecked with symbols of patriotism and mourning, it held the corpse of the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, en route from the place of his death in Washington D.C. to his […]
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The Magnet
One January morning in 2013, an orchestra was recording at 2:30 a.m. They had been working at Petropavlovskaya ulitsa 25A, the P. I. Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theatre in Perm, Russia, since midnight. The piece was “Per pietà, ben mi, perdona,” Fiordiligi’s aria with horn obligato from Mozart’s opera “Così fan tutte.” It still wasn’t […]
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Internal States
The bar exuded a greenish, fluorescent light. Joshua Fineberg stood outside smoking a cigarette. Recently, two people had told me that Fineberg, one of the most important living Spectralist composers alongside Tristan Murail, and a tenured professor at Boston University, had moved to Berlin and begun frequenting the city’s famous clubs. They suggested to me […]
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Sails
In Mexico City, 7-Eleven carries bottled water in the shape of a dumbbell. One day on vacation, I bought one, drank the contents, took a picture, and sent it to Michael Maierhof, one of the most original composers working today and a master manipulator of the sonic properties of plastics. Would he like me to […]
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Matchups
The melody from the hymn Dies Irae breaks the creamy quiet of a restaurant in upmarket Taipei, and the patrons raise their eyes from their waffles and cake and Vienna coffee. The disrupter of the mid-Thursday morning hush is Chung Yiu-kwong, Taiwan’s most noted classical composer, giving an enthusiastic rendition of the Day of Judgement’s […]
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Exile Aria
“Whenever a country is in turmoil, inevitably, people try to find groups to blame for the problems at hand,” conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya began her explanation of why she left her native Russia 22 years ago. “I remember as a small child going to my chorus rehearsals, and every week as I went passing through the […]