Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

For Sofia Gubaidulina

The great Tatar-born composer died today at her home outside Hamburg, at the age of ninety-three. Her compositional voice, rigorous and sensuous in equal measure, spiritually noble to its core, never wavered in intensity, the 2019 orchestral piece Der Zorn Gottes serving as an apt valediction. I wrote about her Astraea improvisations for the New York Times in 1995 and the première of her Viola Concerto for The New Yorker in 1997.

A Laura Cetilia moment

Featured on Loadbang's new disc A Garden Adorned.

Yunchan Lim, Seong-Jin Cho

Testing Their Limits. The New Yorker, March 17, 2025.

A Noriko Baba moment

A survey of Baba's music is available on Kairos.

The spirit of Casals

A criminal authoritarian regime has seized power in this country, and Christian Tetzlaff has made the principled decision to cancel an upcoming American tour: “There seems to be a quietness or denial about what’s going on. I feel utter anger. I cannot go on with this feeling inside. I cannot just go and play a tour of beautiful concerts.”

A Lyatoshynsky moment

Edmond Dédé's Morgiane

Dédé's score on display at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

A Belated Début. The New Yorker, March 3, 2025.

A(nother) Bára Gísladóttir moment

Coy euphemism of the day

The New York Times desperately needs to find language commensurate with the seriousness of the situation.

Reading of the day

From Emily Witt's "Where Do Trans Kids Go From Here?" in The New Yorker: "One father told me that his child had expressed that she was a girl since she began picking out clothes for herself, at the age of two and a half, and that as she grew older her choices in clothing, toys, friends, and activities had remained consistent. 'In every way that’s socially meaningful about what it means to be a girl nowadays in America, that’s what she’s always done,' he said. A military veteran from the Midwest, he was startled to find himself vilified by the executive order, which cast the care he’d sought for his daughter as 'chemical mutilation.' 'I’m not exactly a paragon of virtue or anything, but I’m a person who has lived a good and virtuous American life,' he told me. 'All of a sudden, I felt like I was pushed outside of all of that, and was criminalized and painted as morally perverse.' He and his family have started to map out worst-case scenarios. The father has a legal background, and has found himself reading and rereading the language of Trump’s statements, and even going back to the Federalist Papers. He has found solace in reminding himself of historic examples of Americans who found themselves marginalized for their views and didn’t fold."