New music
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker starts with the score.
Ben Johnston looks back.
Raven Chacon looks for shared experience.
Meredith Monk translates biological process into a new language.
Peter Ablinger on creating texture.
John McCowen goes from experimental music to rock fame and back again.
Simon Steen-Andersen puts transformation on display.
Political art
Russian classical music’s money machine.
On Music and Activism.
Raven Chacon looks for shared experience.
How the far-right Polish government targets artists.
Does classical music need a Rooney Rule?
Susan McClary wants to debate the music.
How classical music’s lack of diversity attracts the far-right.
Weird and wonderful
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.
Who loved it, who hated it – Seth MacFarlane at the San Francisco Symphony.
The top 10 composers who only wrote one famous piece.
Opera
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.
On the impact of Dmitri Hvorostovsky
“The Mother of Us All” at Hudson Hall.
Berlin’s Staatsoper returns to its renovated home.
Soloists and conductors
Why the conductor’s honorific is horrific.
Over 20 years ago, James Levine was nearly caught.
Donald Runnicles thinks conducting is the easy part.
Craig Urquhart remembers his life with the conductor and composer.
How Teodor Currentzis became a Russian sex symbol.
Kirill Gerstein’s marathon career.
The cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras embraces transience.
Women and non-binary composers
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.
Jessica Ekomane believes in mistakes.
Music the profession
Is a popular perfect pitch course a revelation or a scam?
Is a popular perfect pitch course a revelation or a scam?
Why we still need dedicated classical music spaces.
Why the conductor’s honorific is horrific.
Why airlines don’t care about your instrument.
Does music really have the power to heal veterans?
For 2018, what we hope will change in classical music.
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
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 solace of John Cage’s speaking and writing.
The voice
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.”
The extremes of the baritone Georg Nigl.
Early music
Christophe Rousset wants to help the repertoire.
William Christie has questions for himself.
Suzanne Farrin’s subtractive composition.
An interview with Jean Rondeau.
How Andrew Lawrence King tries to compose like Monteverdi.
Ton Koopman on life and his hero Buxtehude.
Kristian Bezuidenhout wants to program music in its context.
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.
Queer
“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.
King Ludwig II’s Wagnerian castle and a lineage of obsession.
A new exhibition on the life of Richard Wagner’s decidedly gay, ambivalently Nazi son.