My email inbox likes to throw a curveball at me every now and then. Much as I hadn’t expected spring in the UK to announce its arrival with freezing temperatures and pistol whips of arctic hail, the suggestion from VAN’s dear editors that I undertake some of the stranger habits of composers was one I […]
Tag: Weird & Wonderful
Posted inReport
The Audiencers
We seldom pay attention to ushers. In “The Natural History of the Theatre,” Theodor Adorno’s otherwise extravagant sociology of concert-going, the usher receives only a glancing mention: a missed opportunity for a writer who discerned the ideological contradictions and atavistic energies of music in a thousand minor details, from gales of applause to foyerside finger […]
Posted inInterview
Physical Movement
In a 2015 Bloomberg article about Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic on tour, reporter Joel Stein introduced an “impeccably dressed, handsome, long-haired” man, referred to by members of the orchestra as “the international man of mystery” or “the most interesting man in the world.” He didn’t mean Dudamel. Stein was referring to Guido […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
Every Schubert Song, Ranked
In her 2019 review-cum-retrospective of John Updike, writer Patricia Lockwood noted that her assignment felt “like a flamboyant completist stunt, like one of those Buzzfeed articles where someone ranks every episode of the original Care Bears cartoons.” I would like to situate this ranking of every Schubert song in the same hallowed pantheon as the […]
Posted inReview
We Got Drunk and Listened to Jonas Kaufmann’s Christmas Album
Considering the bleak happenings that have defined 2020, we can all be thankful for one grand unifying event that restored a little bit of our faith in humanity: Jonas Kaufmann released a Christmas album. Not just any Christmas album: a two-hour, 42-track deluxe set of everything from traditional Alpine tunes (“Es wird scho glei dumpa”) […]
Posted inHistory
The Pianist who Killed Stalin
In his 2017 film “The Death of Stalin,” Armando Iannucci links the titular event to a letter penned by pianist Maria Yudina: “Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, you have betrayed our nation and destroyed its people. I pray for your end and ask the Lord to forgive you. Tyrant.” In Iannucci’s history-as-farce, the dictator reads this note […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Screaming Song is Good to Know…
One of the most memorable panels from Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak’s 1960 book Open House for Butterflies features the line: “A screaming song is good to know in case you need to scream.” I’ve thought about that line a lot in the 4,932 days since 2020 began, and I am ready to sing like […]
Posted inPlaylist
A Timothy Leary Playlist
How to commemorate the centenary of acid guru Timothy Leary, born 100 years ago today in Springfield, Massachusetts? Many will dig into their psychedelic rock collection to spin something like Jefferson Airplane’s “Surrealistic Pillow” (1967) or the Grateful Dead’s “Aoxomoxoa” (1969). More historically-minded psychonauts, however, will reach for their Mozart and Wagner records, paying tribute […]
Posted inRankings & Roundups
Every Scarlatti Sonata, Ranked
Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) wrote a lot of Sonatas. Fair enough: what else was there to do all day before Twitter was invented? Listening to all these pieces in 2020 proved another challenge. I’ll make no claim to have heard each work in monkish concentration, and I make no guarantees for the correctness of my observations. […]
Posted inReport
Sounds From Nowhere
On September 15, 2001, the flutist Klaus Holsten was in the German village of Klein Jasedow, a short drive from the coast of the Baltic Sea, when a truck accidentally unloaded the herbicide Brasan onto 5,000 lemon balm plants. The organic herbs were growing in a garden belonging to Holsten; his wife Beata Seemann, a […]