Posted inInterview

Sketching Lyricism

Anna Thorvaldsdottir sits on a stool with wheels but no back. The hum of electric garden equipment underscores our conversation in her composing studio, and it’s funny to think that the heavyweight harmonic frameworks of one of today’s most sought-after composers might be influenced, on a subconscious level, by the drones of suburban lawnmowers. “I […]

Posted inPages Turned

In The Sonorous Air

It’s my first time visiting Berlin in springtime. Incapable of shaping my own destiny, I find a tongue-in-cheek itinerary for a couple of politics-themed hours in the German capital, designed for irony-addled people with time to burn. I decide to follow the plan with slavish sincerity, heading from Alexanderplatz down Karl-Marx-Allee towards Cafe Sibylle, a […]

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Tender Transitions

Nicole Mitchell is a leading flutist in jazz, a player with one of the strongest senses of swing there is, either inside a beat or playing freely. Her thematic albums and projects like “Mandorla Awakening” and “EarthSeed” are inspired by, and develop, Afrofuturist ideas that she first discovered through the great speculative fiction writer Octavia […]

Posted inEssay

Out of the Woods

In the studios at Maida Vale, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Singers are warming up for a world premiere recording. It’s an opera that once graced the stages of Covent Garden in London, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the Berlin State Opera. But the piece has gone without a professional performance for […]

Posted inPages Turned

Fabric of Her World

“As with Ethel, Rebecca’s friendships were the very fabric of her world,” writes the musicologist Leah Broad in Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World. Queer academia’s gleeful dismantling of history’s “just friends” trope has ventured as far as the Gen Z mainstream, with Atlanta TikToker Oublaire’s sage reminder that “History Hates Lovers.” (“Historians […]

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Collapsing Time

A pioneer of modern electronic music, Morton Subotnick not only encouraged technical innovations but defined new sonic paradigms for the creation of electronic music. Approaching his 90th year in April, he remains as energized and dynamic as ever. As a tech geek and extreme music fan during my high school years in the late 1960s, […]

Posted inReview

Too Big To Fail

Can a piece of music be too big to fail? The latest work by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Finnish composer and conductor who is currently music director of the San Francisco Symphony, has a startling number of what politicians like to call “stakeholders”: The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice (which gave the premiere on […]

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The Threshold of Time

In the big pond full of big fish that is the New York contemporary classical music scene, the Argento New Music Project, led by composer and conductor Michel Galante, is an unusual and irreplaceable specimen. As artistic director of the ensemble, Galante combines two qualities that rarely go together: An ear for logical and creative […]

Posted inInterview

Transience

The composer Rebecca Saunders was not where I imagined her to be. Plans for a meeting in person were moved online, owing to her retreat to the countryside to complete a deadline. So it was a surprise when Saunders appeared, not in some remote rural studio, but in her Berlin flat. “I think a lot […]

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