Posted inPlaylist

A Sea Major Playlist

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of killer whales. Since 2020, pods of orcas have been attacking ships and yachts in European waters. As of about a month ago, more than 500 yachts had been attacked off the Iberian Peninsula alone. This summer, other aquatically-inclined mammals have joined their orca comrades (orca-mrades?), with reports from […]

Posted inRankings & Roundups

The Opera Fuckboy Matrix

What, exactly, is a fuckboy? When I asked people on what remains of classical Twitter to tell me about their favorite fuckboys in opera, the responses I received showed that, even after a nearly-decade-old debate around the word’s manifold meanings and usage, we’ve yet to reach a consensus.  I’m not here to define the fuckboy. […]

Posted inRankings & Roundups

Every Bach Cantata, Ranked

After ranking the complete Scarlatti sonatas and Schubert songs, you might think I’d have learned my lesson, both in time spent and in baffled—or worse—reactions received. Still, I admit when I decided to take on ranking the complete Bach Cantatas, I was a little naive about the time commitment required. With fairly regular listening, this […]

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 inPlaylist

A C Major Playlist

Some days, I sit at the piano and doodle, playing nothing in particular for some unspecified period until I eventually stop. What happens next depends entirely on the amount of music I’ve chewed through the previous week: adventurous or gentle, thickly slathered or flimsily constructed. Little is uniform in these twiddling sessions, save for the […]

Posted inRankings & Roundups

The Most Deserved Deaths in Opera, Ranked

There are countless rankings of the best deaths in opera that grade by the most memorable (“La Bohème,” “La Traviata”), the most epic (“Dialogues of the Carmelites,” “Götterdämmerung”), and the most difficult to stage (“La Wally,” “La Juive”). All of those criteria are well and good, but what I want—what I really, really want—in an […]

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