Saul Williams is a rapper, actor, musician, and slam poet who toys with the sounds of syllables, words, and terminologies. Classical composers, such as Thomas Kessler and Ted Hearne, have found themselves inspired by his texts. We spoke with him about resistance, colonialism, and why he only sits when he’s performing with a string quartet. […]
Tag: Books & Film
Posted inInterview
Other Languages
Sometime in the 1780s, a low-ranked soldier of the Portuguese crown in Brazil named Joaquim José da Silva Xavier began a gradual process of political awakening. Later known as Tiradentes (“tooth-puller”), a derogatory term that referred to his past as an amateur dentist, he organized a group of citizens in a rebellion called the Inconfidência […]
Posted inInterview
Nonfictional Music
Jennie Gottschalk is a composer and scholar currently residing in Boston. Gottschalk holds degrees from The Boston Conservatory and Northwestern University. Her teachers have included Larry Bell, Yakov Gubanov, Jay Alan Yim, Augusta Read Thomas, and Aaron Cassidy. Gottschalk’s new book “Experimental Music Since 1970” was recently published by Bloomsbury. Over the course of a […]
Posted inInterview
The Yellow Suitcases
When the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman died, on July 30 2007, I was at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. It was a cold day, and strange: we had lost the director Michelangelo Antonioni, too. Some of my fellow students and I smoked cigarettes outside. I thought of the character of the Knight in Bergman’s […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Graham F. Valentine Playlist
“Your voice…is attracting the most discerning audiences.” In the 1994 film “Farinelli,” the actor and performer Graham F. Valentine looks down at the kneeling castrato, delivering faint praise in a nobleman’s reedy French. His normal speaking voice is a bass-baritone with a Scottish accent; he can also sing in a penetrating head voice. In this […]
Posted inInterview
Among Strangers
“The talk about music being a universal language is a used and abused cliché,” says Kinan Azmeh, the Syrian clarinetist featured in Morgan Neville’s film “The Music of Strangers.” While there are some basic building blocks of music, its sounds, grammar, and syntax—not to mention methods of teaching, learning, and performing—are as various as the […]
Posted inEssay
Measure 100
There is a passage in the Mozart K. 511 Rondo in A Minor, Measures 98 through 101, And focused on measure 100, where there are At least four different melodies, or fragments Of melodies, together and apart, Resolving themselves, or unresolving themselves With: enigmatic sweetness, or melancholy; Distant memories of victories, Personal, royal, or mythic […]