New music
Salvatore Sciarrino wants everything to connect.
Patricia Alessandrini finds identity in sound.
Na’ama Zisser learns to let go.
Mark Barden wants to reach you on first listen.
Morton Subotnick wants to stay insulated.
Niels Rønsholdt sees beauty in the attempt.
George Benjamin on his third opera, “Lessons in Love and Violence.”
Political art
On the sexual politics of musical metaphors.
Analyzing an aural document of terror.
Does the future of classical lay in its past?
Censorship, political correctness, and the legacy of “America’s Troubadour.”
Russian classical music’s money machine.
On Music and Activism.
Raven Chacon looks for shared experience.
Weird and wonderful
In search of the musical occult.
Unpacking the Instagram score-studying aesthetic.
And wound up hating Mozart.
On “Somnium” and hypnagogic hallucinations.
Investigating classical music on the London Underground.
On Making the Third Ear.
A satire, a lawsuit, and a thin-skinned violinist.
Opera
Allan Clayton focuses on interaction.
Matthias Goerne looks for symbiosis.
George Benjamin on his third opera, “Lessons in Love and Violence.”
Stephen Wadsworth on writing words for Leonard Bernstein.
“Die Gezeichneten” at the Komische Oper in Berlin.
Is “Peter Grimes” a better play than opera?
The up-and-coming alto Wiebke Lehmkuhl.
Soloists and conductors
Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic have had enough.
Listening to Simon Rattle’s goodbye concert in Berlin.
James Levine is suing the Met. No matter what, both parties lose.
Jessica Cottis is always leading.
Why the conductor’s honorific is horrific.
Over 20 years ago, James Levine was nearly caught.
Donald Runnicles thinks conducting is the easy part.
Music the profession
Is a popular perfect pitch course a revelation or a scam?
Norman Lebrecht wants to make the world a little less worse.
Is a popular perfect pitch course a revelation or a scam?
James Levine is suing the Met. No matter what, both parties lose.
How the composer Jörg Widmann became ubiquitous by default.
Is a popular perfect pitch course a revelation or a scam?
Is a popular perfect pitch course a revelation or a scam?
Women and non-binary composers
Patricia Alessandrini finds identity in sound.
Meredith Monk translates biological process into a new language.
On Borealis, an experimental festival for music.
A corrective to the 2018 Oscars Original Score shortlist.
Terre Thaemlitz doesn’t succumb to any scene.
Does classical music need a Rooney Rule?
On Making the Third Ear.
Strings
Roberto González-Monjas and his painstaking preparation.
Alina Ibragimova wants it darker.
An interview with the cellist Steven Isserlis.
Why studies questioning the Stradivarius myth are so persuasive.
Where did classical music’s most famous label go wrong?
An interview with the new JACK Quartet cellist Jay Campbell.
What one octogenarian performer’s experience reveals about getting old in the music business.
Personal essay
A music critic listens with depression.
On listening to music while airborne.
Remembering Klaus Huber.
When a conservatory professor fell in love with his student, it tore a class apart.
Is the prevalence of suicide in opera harmful or healing?
The artistic director of a Jewish orchestra discovers a genre’s roots.
When the concert stage becomes a trigger for trauma, and what to do about it.
The voice
Censorship, political correctness, and the legacy of “America’s Troubadour.”
Mark Padmore wants attention and intention.
On politics and solace in Schubert’s “Winterreise.”
Rethinking the voice with contemporary music.
Saul Williams’s words to music.
A new choral work by Michael Gordon.
A new production of Robert Ashley’s “Dust.”
Early music
Alina Rotaru wants to change the notes.
Pierre Hantaï teaches himself.
Keith and Robert Hill search for the real sound of the 18th century.
Alexei Lubimov is looking for adventure.
Christophe Rousset wants to help the repertoire.
William Christie has questions for himself.
Suzanne Farrin’s subtractive composition.
Queer
On the sexual politics of musical metaphors.
Politics, aesthetics, and the deconstruction of binaries.
“The Gender Agenda,” a musical gameshow by Philip Venables.
Ione completes an opera by her late partner Pauline Oliveros.
On the New York premiere of “Three Way.”
A call for clarity in calls for scores.
Musicians and listeners respond to our survey.
Literature and film
Daniel Mendelsohn on music.
Issue #96 focuses on process.
Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s 40-year-old essay is the most modern music book of the year.
Teju Cole’s musical obsessions.
What music says about the history of colonialism in Brazil.
Oscar Edelstein’s curiosity and defiance.
Songs from a gay Australian childhood and youth.
Music under Putin
Russian classical music’s money machine.
How Teodor Currentzis became a Russian sex symbol.
On the impact of Dmitri Hvorostovsky
Behind the hype of Teodor Currentzis.
The liberation of the Syrian city of Palmyra from ISIS by Russian forces called for a celebration. But this was no ordinary open air concert.
Faced with a hostile government, new, improvised music in Russia is flourishing on the fringe.