Dead or alive, neither dead nor alive, I am the opening, the tomb or the mouth, the one inside the other. —Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus pre-face Difficulties: with that word. How to read it? Two options. The first and most obvious suggestion is of a sustained consideration, long overdue, to the knotty, the many, and the […]
Tag: Composers
Posted inPlaylist
A Wendy Carlos Playlist
At 85, Wendy Carlos remains an enigmatic figure in the world of classical music. Intensely private, she has not granted an interview request in over 15 years. When the first book-length treatment of her life and work was published in 2020— without her consent—Carlos trashed it on her personal website, calling it “mean-spirited” and “presumptuous,” […]
Posted inReview
The Dissolving of the Line
Under the artistic triumvirate of Marie-Therese Bruglacher, Laure M. Hiendl and Bastian Zimmermann, Musik Installationen Nürnberg—in its second edition following a 2022 debut—set out to present music differently: “not as a normal concert, but as an experience in space.” But what happens to music when it leaves the concert hall and instead latches onto a […]
Posted inInterview
Dialogues
Both Catherine Lamb and I arrive for our interview in a west Berlin park slightly distracted, and the universe works to make us more so. First, a bird in a bush behind our bench insists on everyone hearing its loud, virtuosic song; we swiftly relocate to the grass in the middle of the square. Then, […]
Posted inEssay
God’s Time
On a frozen evening in Silesia in January 1941, a young French composer, along with three other prisoners of war, performed an hour-long, eight-movement work for piano, cello, violin and clarinet to a rapt audience. “From the moment I read the back-of-an-album summary…the story of the premiere was inseparable from the music,” Michael Symmons Roberts […]
Posted inEssay
Sitting Down, Standing Up
His very first composition journal is dated 1983, one year after completing his university studies in Vienna and so the first year he could properly consider himself a composer. Peter Ablinger was forever putting things in varying piles and compartments, time and space very much included. “Sometimes I think I might have been an archivist […]
Posted inProfile
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 […]
Posted inInterview
Wrangling, Plunging
Beginning with Stockhausen on April 6, “20th Century Radicals” is a new 40-part series about the composers who shaped the previous century. Over the course of 40 weekly episodes, it covers Andriessen and Berio through to Xenakis and La Monte Young, via El-Dabh, Jolas, Murail and Takahashi, and many more. It’s the sort of series […]
Posted inInterview
Unnatural Invisibility
Some composers are celebrated in their lifetimes. Others must wait for history to catch up. A composer faces a plethora of challenges throughout their career, from testing an edgy yet dubious idea or missing a crucial post-concert networking opportunity to simply submitting compositions on time. The odds of slipping into obscurity are extremely high. Add […]
Posted inEssay
The Sacral End
Strange and uneasy, her relation to new music, and in hindsight only growing ever more so. Which is not to say Sofia Gubaidulina did not belong to the field: she carried excellent early modernist credentials handed on from 1950s Moscow, having earned herself a censorship from the Kremlin and, in 1992, the requisite flight into […]