Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Nightafternight playlist

Anima Sacra: Sacred arias of Fago, Heinichen, Terradellas, Sarro, Feo, Zelenka, Hasse, Schiassi, Durante; Jakub Józef Orliński, Il pomo d'oro (Warner)

Kate Soper, IPSA DIXIT; Wet Ink (New World)

Du Yun, Dinosaur Scar and other works; ICE (New Focus)

Tyshawn Sorey, Pillars; Sorey, Stephen Haynes, Ben Gerstein, Todd Neufeld, Joe Morris, Carl Testa, Mark Helias, Zach Rowden (firehouse 12)

Salieri, Les Horaces; Judith van Wanroij, Cyrille Dubois, Julien Dran, Jean-Sébastien Bou, Andrew Foster-Williams, Christophe Rousset directing Les Talens Lyriques (Aparte)

Bach, Six Suites; Kim Kashkashian (ECM)

Bach, Sonata and Partita No. 1, Sonata No. 2; Hilary Hahn (Decca)

Dmitri Tymoczko, Fools & Angels and other works; Newspeak, Illinois Modern Ensemble, Collide Trio (New Focus)

Philip Glass, Symphony No. 11; Dennis Russell Davies conducting the Bruckner Orchester Linz (Orange Mountain)

Bob Dylan, More Blood, More Tracks (Columbia)

Debussy

Beauty in the Void. The New Yorker, Oct. 29, 2018.

Meyerbeer's Huguenots

The Meyerbeer Case. The New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2018.

Igor Levit's Life

A recommendation on the New Yorker website.

First nights at the Met and the NY Phil

A Cultural Comment on the New Yorker website, Oct. 4, 2018.

At the graves of Debussy and Fauré

Previously: At the grave of [X].

Final Welles

How Orson Welles's "The Other Side of the Wind" Was Rescued from Oblivion, on the New Yorker website, Sept. 26, 2018.

Godowsky plays Clair de lune

Nightafternight playlist

— Cassandra Miller, O Zomer!, Philip the Wanderer, For Mira, Duet for Cello and Orchestra; Apartment House, Philip Thomas, Mira Benjamin, Charles Curtis with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony (another timbre)

— Mark Turner and Ethan Iverson, Temporary Kings (ECM)

— ARC: Glass and Handel arias; Anthony Roth Costanzo, Jonathan Cohen conducting Les Violons du Roy (Decca)

— Georg Friedrich Haas, Trois Hommages; Mabel Kwan (New Focus)

— Paula Matthusen and Olivia Valentine, Between Systems and Grounds (Carrier)

— Prism I: Bach Fugue in E-flat, Beethoven Quartet Opus 127, Shostakovich Quartet No. 15; Danish Quartet (ECM)

— Life: Bach-Busoni, Busoni, Liszt, Schumann, Rzewski, Bill Evans; Igor Levit (Sony, out 10/5)

— Reicha, Études dans le genre fugé; Ivan Ilič (Chandos)

— Birgit Nilsson: The Great Live Recordings (Sony)

Sedona Miscellany

And a new season begins. Next weekend in NYC brings a Feldman festival entitled Softly, curated by Marilyn Nonken. Alongside familiar landmarks like Triadic Memories and Patterns in a Chromatic Field there will be early piano works, to be announced, and three short Feldman-based films by Zahra Partovi and Chris Villars. For further showings of the latter, see Villars's site..... Beginning tonight is another edition of the Resonant Bodies Festival, with Paul Pinto, Helga Davis, Lucy Dhegrae, Jen Shyu, Nathalie Joachim, Caroline Shaw, Sarah Maria Sun, Gelsey Bell, and Pamela Z.... Missy Mazzoli's latest opera, Proving Up, opens the Miller Theatre season on Sept. 26. Zachary Woolfe interviews her for the New York Times.... WasteLAnd has announced its new season, with Katherine Young the featured composer.... The LA Phil has announced details of its Fluxus series, adding yet more allure to its extraordinary centennial season. Yuval Sharon will direct Cage's Europeras 1 and 2, Yoko Ono will be given a portrait concert, Patricia Kopatchinskaja will perform Fluxus pieces at the Getty, and La Monte Young is scheduled to preside over his Second Dream of The High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer.... The Pulitzer Arts Foundation and the St. Louis Symphony have announced their 2018-19 concert series, featuring Mazzoli, Shaw, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and Mary Kouyoumdjian, among others.... In this week's New Yorker, Rebecca Mead has a wonderful profile of George Benjamin, who speaks revealingly about his long development as a composer and the origins of his recent operatic work.

Bernstein 100

Hero Worship. The New Yorker, Sept. 17, 2018.

Well, here it is

Semi-ironic

At some point I'd like to publish a book of essays with the title And the World Was Calm.

Playlist

— Gabriel Kahane, Book of Travelers (Nonesuch)

— Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F; Kirill Gerstein, David Robertson conducting the St. Louis Symphony (myrios)

— Blitzstein, The Cradle Will Rock; Ginger Costa-Jackson, Keith Jameson, Christopher Burchett, Aubrey Babcock, John Mauceri conducting Opera Saratoga (Bridge)

— Linda Catlin Smith, Wanderer and other works; Apartment House (another timbre)

— Anthony Cheung, Cycles and Arrows; Spektral Quartet, Claire Chase, Winston Choi, Atlas Ensemble, ICE (New Focus)

— Bach, Six Cello Suites; Yo-Yo Ma (Sony)

— Cassandra Miller, Just So: String Quartets; Quatuor Bozzini (another timbre)

— Ruth Gipps, Symphonies No. 2 and 4, Knight in Armour, Song for Orchestra; Rumon Gamba conducting the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (Chandos)

Bernstein v. Nixon

From the White House tapes:

Nixon Bernstein

More here.

1989, the number

In my state-of-new-music essay in this week's issue of The New Yorker, I had originally intended to discuss several recent books on early-twenty-first-century composition. In the end, I chose to concentrate on Tim Rutherford-Johnson's Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989. But I'd like to mention various others that have informed my listening and thinking. Jennie Gottschalk's Experimental Music Since 1970 has quickly established itself as an essential text, mapping the vibrancy of experimentalism in the post-Cage age. David Metzer's Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century focuses on established, quasi-canonical figures like Ferneyhough, Lachenmann, Sciarrino, Kurtág, and Saariaho. In so doing, Metzer vigorously opposes the idea of an endpoint for, or drastic transformation of, the modernist tradition: instead, he sees a network of continuities from the heroic early years to the present. The Cambridge anthology Transformations of Musical Modernism contains Susan McClary's crucial essay "The Lure of the Sublime" and much other work of value. Finally, I was fascinated by Seth Brodsky's study From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious, even if its extensive deployment of Lacanian theory went somewhat over my head. Brodsky proposes a Lacanian distinction between "master modernism" and "analytic modernism," which could be aligned with the dividing line between past and present traced in McClary's essay. Brodsky writes: "A master modernism, dominating discourse with its calls for the new, fantasizes the future as its (Real) object. An analytic modernism, dismantling domination through its desire for absolute difference, takes the past as its (split) subject." Still, I find myself most in sympathy with Tim's approach, which avoids getting caught up in categorical debates around modernism and instead strives to address contemporary music very much on its own terms.

While working on the article, I also read or re-read George E. Lewis's indispensable A Power Stronger Than Itself, Benjamin Piekut's Experimentalism Otherwise, Robert Adlington's Composing Dissent, the Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, Joshua Clover's 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About, and Nate Chinen's just-published Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century.

The state of the art

The Sounds of Music. The New Yorker, Aug. 27, 2018.

Jackie to Lenny

The Leonard Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress has recently added much new material to its online trove. Above is a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to "Felicia and Lennie," dated January 1970 — some months before the appearance of Tom Wolfe's reactionary hit-job on the Bernsteins.

Bayreuth 2018

Wagner Rebooted. The New Yorker, Aug. 20, 2018.

Still Wagnerian

Wagnerism may not look much shorter than it did in January, but I have managed to excise more than eighty thousand words.