I. Overture AI is the buzzword. Those little magic stars that pop up in every app, the sunlit uplands of a less laborious future, they are virtually everywhere—and are changing how we think about creativity. AI is a hyperobject, a symbol that refers to a wide range of practices, software and intentions across time and […]
Tag: New(ish) Music
Posted inInterview
“Like ‘The Archers’ On Speed”
It’s been a decade since Jennifer Walshe described “The New Discipline” in a program text for Borealis Festival. This was not a school or a style, but a way of working that she saw shared across music she was witnessing, “where the physical, theatrical and visual aspects are as important as the sonic.” The text […]
Posted inInterview
Exploratory Shapes
The career of soprano Lucy Shelton has been shaped by exploration. Shelton, a contemporary music specialist who has premiered works by Knussen, Carter and Grisey, continues to prove that musical curiosity outweighs perceptions of age. Looking to the 2025-26 season, she’ll make her Metropolitan Opera company debut, in Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” aged 82. I sat […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Norma Beecroft Playlist
The composer Norma Beecroft (1934-2024) was known for works that combined computer-generated and natural acoustic sounds. One among only a few Canadian female composers of her time, Beecroft’s musical formation, beyond her early training in Toronto, came with notable Italian musicians: composers Goffredo Petrassi and Bruno Maderna, and flutist Severino Gazzelloni. Yet her three years […]
Posted inReview
I Saw Morton Feldman’s “For Philip Guston” Twice in One Month
I had just finished making plans to attend the Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg at the end of November. Within the festival’s theme of “Extremes,” I was especially looking forward to a performance of Morton Feldman’s epic “For Philip Guston” by Sophie Deshayes (flutes), Pascal Meyer (piano and celeste) and Galdric Subirana (percussion). Then I […]
Posted inReview
On Shame
Shame effaces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different linings of the same glove. Shame, it might finally be said, transformational shame, is performativity. —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 1. Two things about shame. First: it is […]
Posted inInterview
So Everything
Earlier this week, Nina Guo, a soprano, composer and improviser originally from Pasadena, California, performed a piece of hers called “The Rides Are Going Up Again” at the Berlin experimental music venue KM28. The delicate work combined gentle, rhythmic spoken poetry with gauzy recorded vocalizations—a sound, I thought and Guo later confirmed, inspired by Morton […]
Posted inEssay
The Book of Hours
Twentieth-century physics expanded our sense of subatomic and cosmological scales, opening up musical time and space in the process. Modernism is full of the complex dance between “large” and “small.” It includes the encyclopedic gigantism of works like Mahler’s Symphony No.8, Havergal Brian’s “Gothic” Symphony, or Alexander Scriabin’s “Mysterium.” The latter, an unperformed and unperformable […]
Posted inReview
Anti-Thematic
Ours is the age of themes. Drowning in the deluge of streaming content whose rush, flow, and surge defines what Anna Kornbluh last year termed our too-late capitalism, any and all aspirant media—entertainment, art, or otherwise—is increasingly compliant with that dictatorial imperative handed down from marketing departments on high: brand or bust. Streamlined themes get […]
Posted inProfile
Trying To Crystallize Something
The first time that Siwan Rhys played Galina Ustvolskaya’s music in public, something strange happened. She’d been asked to play Ustvolskaya’s arresting Sixth Sonata at the launch of Kate Molleson’s book Sound Within Sound at Cafe OTO in Dalston. This wasn’t the first time that Rhys had encountered Ustvolskaya’s musical worldview—she’d first heard it live […]