Over the last few months, I found myself unexpectedly steeped in George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” while working on “American Rhapsody,” a documentary about the work’s centennial for BBC Radio 3. Part of me said yes to the project because I thought that it would be a nice diversion from the dumpster fire of real […]
Tag: New(ish) Music
Posted inEssay
The Black Modernism of American Music
How many years should pass, in polite society, before a country is allowed to have its own national style of classical music? In 1939, over 150 years after the Declaration of Independence, Leonard Bernstein began his senior thesis at Harvard with the statement, “I propose a new and vital American nationalism.” In the essay, “The […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Luigi Nono Playlist
Luigi Nono would have turned 100 on January 29. He was born, raised, and died in Venice, whose tradition of separate choirs performing from different places within the church had a profound impact on the composer’s sense of sound, space, and silence. Despite this relationship with the past, few musical oeuvres have quite as palpable […]
Posted inInterview
Assembling an Organism
Lithuanian composer Justė Janulytė watches and listens intently to the mysterious wonders of our reality. Born in Vilnius in 1982, Janulytė’s pieces explore time and space through the large-scale texturing of sound, moving between minimalism, spectralism, and electroacoustic music. Because of this, listeners have often compared listening to her music to being bathed in an overflow […]
Posted inInterview
A Struggle for Memory
The Catalan composer Hèctor Parra is the author of a large body of work that builds sonic bridges between arts and society, making connections with the work of writers and artists such as Marie NDiaye, Jaume Plensa and Händl Klaus, or scientists such as the physicist Lisa Randall. His multidisciplinary ear looks for collaborations that […]
Posted inProfile
The Things We Form
It is afternoon in Berlin. Sarah Saviet is not meant to be here. She is meant to be hiking, unreachable in the woods in Spain, but, change of plans, she’s here, playing Bach: in her living room, an afternoon in Berlin. And so we meet. We talk, and we do not cover everything. She is […]
Posted inStuff I’ve Been Hearing
Recordings for the End of Time
Are we still meant to be listening to music? This is something I’ve been struggling with over the last two-and-a-half months, even when I am, by virtue of my profession, actually meant to be listening to music. Either the political ramifications of a work start to become too foregrounded (try listening to Maria Callas in […]
Posted inInterview
Explosions of the Voice
When I spoke to Paola Prestini over Zoom, we immediately started talking about her dream to make an opera from Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, a novel about two women whose lives are forged in response to each other. Prestini’s music is just as defined by her collaborations. In an interview ostensibly about her, she […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Psappha Playlist
“Psappha is now closed.” On November 6, Psappha, a contemporary music ensemble based in Manchester, posted a short notice that signaled the end of over 30 years of commissioning, performing, and championing music from the 20th and 21st centuries. On the perennially shaky UK new music scene, organizations are routinely thinned, trimmed and pruned, but […]
Posted inProfile
A Lovers’ Discourse
Evan Johnson is a composer; he thinks about sound. But Evan Johnson is also the rare composer who thinks just as much about sight. It’s true that, to the ear, his music is often extremely affecting in its tightrope delicacy, but that aural richness is only a happy consequence of an opulent visual field: his […]