When he wasn’t busy scoring for the likes of Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Elio Petri, Brian De Palma and Terrence Malick, Ennio Morricone could be found hunched over a chessboard. He was a good enough player to hold former world champion Boris Spassky—who famously lost to Bobby Fischer in 1972—to […]

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Inspired by the ancient legend of Indra’s net, which depicts the Buddhist concept of interpenetration, Meredith Monk’s latest work metaphorizes the interdependency of humans with the natural world. “Indra’s Net” meditates on the earth’s vulnerability through a multimodal interplay of sound, silence, gesture, space, and time. Throughout the performance, Monk, her cohort of seven other […]

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I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him. “I am alive. No, you are dead.”—Maurice Blanchot, “The Instant of My Death” When a poet puts off an old style… he or […]

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I. “You Want to Stop Listening” 1996, Bregenz Festival.  The semi-staged world premiere of my opera “Nacht” on texts by Friedrich Hölderlin. The journalist Reinhard Kager predicted that the work would have a great future.  Looking back, I understand why. Thanks to the spare scenic means (different plot strands were illuminated using different kinds of […]

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We do not speak of horror. (Well, not in public, anyway.) It has been the tacit agreement of two generations of new music that cinematic horror is the forbidden aesthetic referent: a real and prevalent influence but one whose admittance is generally deemed more detrimental to the cause than worth its expository fruit. In private conversation, […]

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Walter Zimmermann’s music has a rare combination of stasis and flow. It wanders without being lost. It communicates calm curiosity and curious calm. Many composers have written music about nature, but Zimmermann’s is one of the few musics that seems as if nature itself could have created it.  In April, he turned 75. On Friday, […]

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In 1930, Ruth Crawford went to Berlin. Nearly a century ago, she was a few years younger than I am now. I imagine a young American woman deeply intrigued (intimidated?) by her European contemporaries and eager to feel “the scene” under her feet. I can relate.  In a 2017 New York Times portrait, William Robin […]

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“Anamorphosi” (1980) When the term anamorphosis appeared in the 17th century, it was used to describe a visual effect that had existed for some time but had not yet been given a technical name: by means of an optical transposition a form, not visible at first blush, becomes a readable image when perceived from a […]

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The composer Wolfgang Rihm died on the night of July 27 at the age of 72. His friend, the Swiss composer Dieter Ammann, was in close contact with him until close to the very end.  The two artists have known each other for nearly 30 years. Rihm once described Ammann’s music as “never idle, always […]

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A piece of clay dropping in a ceramic pot is the centerpiece of Leilehua Lanzilotti’s sound installation (single-channel video directed by Lanzilotti, cinematography by Gahlord Dewald) in the “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” exhibit at The Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York.  Lanzilotti, a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist in music, released their latest album, “the sky […]

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