It was the year 2009, and the Walt Disney Company was refunding DVDs because they did not make customers’ children geniuses. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Baby Einstein LLC’s educational videos were a juggernaut of American child-rearing. The company’s VHS tapes and DVDs like “Baby Bach” and “Baby Mozart” consisted of soothing videos […]
Tag: Music & Health
Posted inEssay
Listening to Classical Music in Recovery
Long before I became addicted to—or had even tasted—alcohol, I was hooked on music. Ever since discovering classical music’s mood-altering effects at the age of ten, while listening to the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s “Requiem,” I had abused it like a hardened junkie, turning to it constantly to regulate moods over which I had increasingly little […]
Posted inEssay
Democracy of Dreams
Earlier this year, my piano teacher—by my side through the years I spent inching through “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” treating Bach’s counterpoint like moral instruction—sent me a lullaby she had composed for my daughter, who was not yet born. The audio arrived by text message one morning. She wrote that she had been thinking about the […]
Posted inReport
Multisensory Perceptions
The traditional standards of ability and expression in classical music have often overlooked diverse perspectives. Such practices have helped create systemic inequalities that are still profoundly entrenched; recent findings from the Musicians’ Census reveal that 71% of disabled musicians have faced or witnessed discrimination, with 19% reporting it as a significant barrier to career progression. Such […]
Posted inEssay
Healing Invisibly
It is a medical axiom that if a doctor doesn’t bring their humanity with them to work, they won’t find it on the way home. Where doctors find their particular brand of humanism—the kind that drives them toward suffering—is a mystery. But many have looked for it in music. Edward Jenner, discoverer of the smallpox […]
Posted inPlaylist
The Best Opening Chords in Classical Music
Some pieces of music burst into life with feats of virtuosic daring; others rumble up from the bowels of the earth; some loom over you hieratically. Many beginnings are defined by some brilliant melodic gesture: Strauss’s “Don Juan,” for instance, scales the orchestra with a kind of priapic triumph. As a miserable year comes to […]
Posted inInterview
“It’s Only Music, After All”
My first proper encounter with Philip Thomas’s playing came through his box set of Morton Feldman’s piano music, released on the label Another Timbre in 2019. The performances are intimate to the point of sensuality, every gesture like a phantom hand hovering above the tiny hairs on your arm, in that fragile space between presence […]
Posted inEssay
A Chained Man’s Bruise
“You get this idea of someone knowing that something is not right,” experimental vocalist Elaine Mitchener says of Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King.” “It’s askew. You know the headache you have when you have a migraine—you can’t actually see something in front of the eye? That’s how I feel with this: […]
Posted inInterview
“Stop Touring, Take Mushrooms”
Pekka Kuusisto and I have turned up to the interview looking vaguely similar. Two pairs of glasses, lots of short, dark-blond hair, and two not dissimilar jumpers meet on the screen: mine, a sludge-green skiing fleece borrowed from my dad; his, a bottle-green Icelandic-knit sweater made by his mother-in-law during lockdown. Kuusisto is an intense […]
Posted inInterview
Pain and Transfiguration
Often the most interesting nuggets of interviews arrive when questioning dissolves into chatting. “Sorry, that previous answer was a bit wishy-washy,” Robin Ticciati says on reflection: Following the tenor David Butt Philip’s recent Times of London interview, where he advised young UK singers to head abroad for the betterment of their careers post-Brexit, I’d asked […]