When members of the Belgrade Philharmonic stepped onto a road crossing in a brief, silent protest last Friday, they were approached by an angry motorist. After being asked to muster a few minutes of restraint and loudly refusing, the driver floored the gas pedal. The outcome? Four members of the orchestra were run down, resulting […]
Tag: Music & Politics
Posted inInterview
Wonderful Chaos
On December 8, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was swiftly toppled from power after 13 years of oppressive rule. Syrian communities around the world celebrated the sudden shift in power as Assad was granted asylum in Russia. What does this mean for Syria—and for Syrian musicians? I caught up with Aeham Ahmad, a pianist and a […]
Posted inEssay
Bronze Age Pervert’s Guide to Music
One day in 1999, a decade after the “new” musicology was really new, and at the tail end of the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s, I was an 18-year-old freshman and wannabe musicologist attending a job talk for a new hire in the musicology department at my undergraduate institution. A female candidate presented her […]
Posted inInterview
Testimony
One Sunday afternoon last month, I attended the benefit concert Make Freedom Ring at St John’s Waterloo, an Anglican church near London’s South Bank. Under a striking painting of the crucifixion—one of many intensely colored murals painted for the Church of England by Jewish refugee Hans Feibusch, who fled Germany in the 1930s—the pianist Jayson […]
Posted inReport
Human Values
Like the rest of the world, the classical music community also spent most of this week reacting to the news of another Trump presidency. All this week, we’ve been fielding responses from musicians in America, asking for their immediate reaction. Here is a selection of them. Seth Parker Woods, cellist “The work truly begins now. […]
Posted inPlaylist
A U.S. Election Night Playlist
It’s that time again: When a handful of voters in a handful of counties in a handful of states in the United States decide the fate of planet Earth. The (once again) absurdly high stakes of the U.S. presidential election inspired me to make a playlist that doesn’t try to compete with substance use, CNN […]
Posted inBreaking
The UK government closes its review into Arts Council England
The fate of the Archer review into Arts Council England (ACE) has been unclear for some time. After a government review of ACE was announced in March—led by Mary Archer, a former chair of the Science Museum Group—the public review was paused before the general election in July. After an email from a Labour government […]
Posted inReport
Welcome to Shorworld
“Fortune is like a bird in a wood. If we know how to whistle to her she will come to us.” —from pianist Ashley Wass’s biography on X, unattributed I: The Amateur About two years ago, a renowned European musician received a call from his agency with an offer for an unusual gig. A Dubai […]
Posted inInterview
Waiting Outside
Nearly three years ago, Maria Kalesnikava, the Belarusian flutist, curator, politician, and icon of the resistance against the Lukaschenko regime, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for alleged “conspiracy with the intent of illegal power seizure” and “founding and leadership of an extremist organization,” in a case widely considered to be politically motivated. In […]
Posted inInterview
The Truth Was Out There
The pianist Pavel Kushnir died on July 27 at the age of 39 in a prison in Birobidzhan, Russian Federation, apparently of complications from a days-long dry hunger strike. In late May, Kushnir was arrested by FSB officers on charges of incitement to terrorism. On his YouTube channel, Kushnir, under the username Inoagent Mulder—he was […]