With Trump’s tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue and combat-fatigued foot soldiers guarding masked ICE agents in Los Angeles, who’s listening to “Appalachian Spring”? How does Aaron Copland’s World War II-era patriotic evocation of the American pastoral strike our ears in an era of xenophobic, gun-toting vigilantism, when small towns are propagandized as the last stand […]
Tag: 20th Century
Posted inReview
Modal Incantations
Who was Yvonne Loriod? To most, she is known as a virtuoso pianist, an inspirational teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, and the dedicatee of many pieces by Olivier Messiaen, whom she married in 1961. Few are aware that she was also a composer, which is hardly surprising as none of her works were published in […]
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 […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Maurizio Pollini Playlist
The 2014 EuroArts documentary portrait of Maurizio Pollini, “De main de maître,” opens with a literal portrait: that of the pianist’s great-uncle. The interviewer mistakes the painting for Pollini himself. Pollini recounts the life of his forbear: “He ran away from home when he was 16, in 1800, joined Garibaldi’s army, and took part in […]
Posted inPlaylist
A “Rhapsody in Blue” Remix Playlist
Over the last few months, I found myself unexpectedly steeped in George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” while working on “American Rhapsody,” a documentary about the work’s centennial for BBC Radio 3. Part of me said yes to the project because I thought that it would be a nice diversion from the dumpster fire of real […]
Posted inHistory
How Parsis Came to Love Western Classical Music
At any Western classical music performance that I attend in Mumbai, the audience is always a sea of elderly Parsis. (Parsis are a tiny community of Zoroastrians who migrated from Iran to India in the eighth century.) There were the regulars: the elderly gentleman with a scimitar nose, bobbing his head in time to the […]
Posted inInterview
Where the Trees Are
Whether it’s Julius Eastman’s “Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan of Arc,” Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” or Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” listening to Davóne Tines sing is like watching rock climber Alexander Honnold free solo up El Capitan: You’re struck by the raw power and voltage of his stentorian […]
Posted inPages Turned
Through the Rubble
There’s a decent case for Felix Mendelssohn being the most important figure in the history of Western classical music, though primarily for the music he programmed, rather than for the music he wrote. Answering the impassioned cry of Bach’s biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel for an increased visibility of masterpieces if music wished to be taken […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Sea Major Playlist
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of killer whales. Since 2020, pods of orcas have been attacking ships and yachts in European waters. As of about a month ago, more than 500 yachts had been attacked off the Iberian Peninsula alone. This summer, other aquatically-inclined mammals have joined their orca comrades (orca-mrades?), with reports from […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Kaija Saariaho Playlist
The world lost a bit of its wonder on June 2, when Kaija Saariaho died at the age of 70 following a battle with glioblastoma. Diagnosed with the aggressive brain cancer in early 2021, Saariaho gave no major announcement about her health, nor did she document the two years of treatment that followed. When she […]