Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

A Bekah Simms moment

Featured on Simms's new album Bestiaries (Centrediscs).

For Ned Rorem

The gentleman composer died yesterday at the age of ninety-nine. What I wrote about him in 2003: "To read Rorem’s writing is to feel the agony and the bravery of composing in America. Anyone who writes music for a living is a hero, and Rorem is more heroic than most, because he has compromised so little of what he holds dear. His prose will outlast the sneering of his critics, and his music is too mysteriously sweet to die away. To him should go the final word: 'The frustration of being nonexistent keeps us awake.'"

A very long Missy Mazzoli moment

The invaluable OperaVision channel has made available a stream of Mazzoli's The Listeners, whose world première recently took place at the Norwegian Opera, in Oslo. My quick first impression is of a potent, chilling, and excruciatingly relevant work, perhaps comparable in impact to Kaija Saariaho's Innocence. The libretto is by Royce Vavrek, who also supplied the text for Mazzoli's first full-length opera, Breaking the Waves. Opera Philadelphia and the Lyric Opera of Chicago are the co-commissioners, and I look forward to seeing the opera live at one company or the other.

Bezuidenhout's fortepianos

The Shock of the Old. The New Yorker, Nov. 21, 2022.

Bookshelf

New and recent publications of interest.

Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns (McNally Editions)

Tom Perchard, Stephen Graham, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Holly Rogers, Twentieth-Century Music in the West: An Introduction (Cambridge UP)

Jennifer Bain, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen (Cambridge UP)

Stephen Walsh, The Beloved Vision: A History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Pegasus)

Jennifer Homans, Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century (Random House)

Jared Farmer, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees (Basic Books)

Greil Marcus, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography (Yale UP)

Kevin C. Karnes, Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground (University of Chicago Press)

Eric Saylor, Vaughan Williams (Oxford UP)

A Jane Sheldon moment

A Jessie Cox moment

Cox will present a collaborative work with the Sun Ra Arkestra at the DiMenna Center in NYC on Nov. 5. brin solomon recently interviewed him for VAN. I wrote about his music last year.

Arch-villain architecture

The view shared by Galka Scheyer and Harry Bosch.

A New Yorker commentary on the modernist villain's lair.

The new Geffen Hall

Vision Quest. The New Yorker, Oct. 31, 2022.

For Peter Schjeldahl

If it is possible for a critic to be a genius, then Peter was one. Just a few weeks ago, The New Yorker published one of his finest pieces ever, on Mondrian. It ends with a grandly dizzying sentence that contains the phrase "adamantine conundrum." This, I told him, was worthy of Wallace Stevens. Peter was a raucously, symphonically vital writer right to the end, immune to cliché and addicted to surprise. In person, he was quick, funny, honest, and wise. A couple of decades ago, in some now extinct diner in the East Village, we had a long conversation that touched on heavy matters, and in the course of it he said, "Faith is not panicking." Thank you, Peter, for everything.

Remembrances: David Remnick, The New Yorker, The New York Times