Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

John Roberts tramples the Constitution

Cristian Farias: "The real import of Roberts’s language here is not that it gave Trump a shield from prosecution (though that was the immediate result); the ruling gave Trump a 'sword' to brandish across the executive branch—which is exactly why laws, institutions, and what remains of the constitutional order are being slashed to bits in Trump’s Washington now."

The destruction of government science

As the son and grandson of career-long employees of the US Geological Survey, I found this E. Tammy Kim article in The New Yorker tremendously sad to read: "At U.S.G.S. and other Interior agencies, thousands of emerging scientists saw their careers cut short. And, in fields such as geology and ecology, many were women. 'My graduate program, my cohort, was ten women and five men,' Mary said. 'Participation was being broadened among younger people.'"

The decline of BAM

Laurie Anderson in the NYT: “I used to go to BAM in the ’80s and ’90s once every couple of weeks and I’ve only been a couple times a year in the last few years. Sometimes the programming wasn’t something I was so into — not as experimental. I like stuff that’s way out on a limb.” It might be added that BAM's current production of A Streetcar Named Desire is not, contrary to what the article claims, "the sort of buzzy production that was once a staple of the Brooklyn Academy of Music." The institution reached its peak offering Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, Mark Morris, Anderson herself, and other artists of high imagination — not shows trading on Hollywood celebrity.

The logic of dictatorship

Jamelle Bouie: "This is a claim of sovereign authority. This is a claim that the president has the power to declare a state of exception around a group of people and expel them from the nation — no questions asked. It is anti-constitutional — a negation of the right to be free, in Locke’s words, of 'the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.' There is nothing in this vision of presidential power that limits it to foreign nationals. Who is to say, under the logic of the Department of Justice, that the president could not do the same to a citizen?"

Town hall of the day

Laramie, Wyoming: "Another woman who did not give her name described uncertain working conditions while serving as a fellow for the Department of Defense. 'Every day we get unsigned emails that are supposedly [from the United States Office of Personnel Management]. Are you scared? Are you getting those emails? Do you know what DOGE is doing?' she asked. Unsatisfied with the congresswoman’s response, the crowd chanted 'answer.' 'She asked me if I was scared and if I knew what DOGE was doing, and I said ‘no’ to both,' Hageman told the audience."

The spirit of Casals 2: András Schiff

The great pianist's statement announcing the cancellation of future American concerts: "Some people might say, 'Just shut up and play.' I cannot, in good conscience, do that. We do not live in an ivory tower where the arts are untouched by society. Arts and politics, arts and society are inseparable. Therefore, as artists, we must react to the horrors and injustices of this world. Have we learned nothing from the course of history — as recently as Europe in the 1930s? Perhaps not. The American people have spoken – and we have heard them. Yes, indeed, there is a 'new sheriff in town.' Which has made it a very different 'town' — one that some of us no longer wish to visit. It is no longer obligatory. Thank you for your friendship and continued support. Let’s not give up hope for better times."

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."

A Ferdinand Ries moment

Janne Nisonen and the Tapiola Sinfonietta have recorded Ries's Fourth and Fifth Symphonies for Ondine.

92 years ago today

On Feb. 11, 1933, Thomas Mann took a train from Munich to Amsterdam to deliver a lecture version of his essay "Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner." On the same day, the great liberal paper Vossische Zeitung gave a skeptical account of a speech by the recently appointed Reich Chancellor: "Once again Hitler dodged the question of his concrete working program as head of the government and instead cobbled together a sequence of loose thoughts about Volk and nation in numbered points of a 'program.'" The previous day, the Zentrumspartei issued a "decided protest" against Göring's "unconstitutional" dissolution of the Prussian parliament. Mann had no idea at this time that he was going into exile, but he would not return to Germany until 1949.

Alma Mahler-Werfel annotated

Mahler-Werfel's postcard to Leonard Bernstein, Dec. 1960.

Femme Vitale. The New Yorker, Feb. 10, 2025.

Because this article involved a fair amount of archival research, I thought it might be helpful to append some endnotes, for the benefit of anyone wishing to know the sources of various quotations. I'm grateful to John Pollack and the staff at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, for facilitating my visits to the Mahler-Werfel Collection (MWC in the notes below). "Alma Maria Tagebuch" refers to the typewritten transcription of Mahler-Werfel's post-1902 diaries, which she used as the basis for the two versions of her memoirs, And the Bridge Is Love and Mein Leben. (The typescript is bound in red covers stamped "Das Tagebuch der Alma Maria.") References to the 1898-1902 diaries are given by date; all can be found in the published German edition, Tagebuch-Suiten 1898–1902, ed. Antony Beaumont and Susanne Rode-Breymann (Fischer, 1997), and most in the abridged English translation, The Diaries 1898–1902, trans. Antony Beaumont (Faber & Faber, 2000). Translations are my own. Much thanks to Jane Bua, who fact-checked the piece, and Daniel Zalewski and Leo Carey, who edited it.

Los Angeles history and the fires

The Freedman House; Villa Aurora; Kohner's dissertation.

An essay at the New Yorker website, Feb. 1, 2025.