The composer, performer, and media artist Pamela Z works with a wide variety of techniques, including “voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video,” and has produced art both for the concert hall and the museum. From San Francisco, she sent us this playlist. Each track here contains a multiplicity of influences; taken together, the […]
Tag: Women in Music
Posted inInterview
The Middle of the Highway
On a recent Wednesday, I met the Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang in a café in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood: an area popular with classical musicians for its chic, international atmosphere. She had to cancel our previous appointment, writing on WhatsApp that she had a bad cold; then a doctor diagnosed her with mononucleosis. She described […]
Posted inInterview
Amour
On December 1, the Metropolitan Opera in New York City will perform its first opera by a female composer since 1903. Kaija Saariaho’s 2000 opera “L’Amour de Loin” is a haunting tale of love transcending the bounds of distance and death, adapted from a medieval troubadour’s fictionalized life story. There are only three characters: Jaufre […]
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Adaptation
10 years ago, in an ill-tempered article for the Berliner Zeitung, a music critic coined the term “cuddle classical.” It referred to musicians whose PR strategies tended towards the sweet and approachable; alongside the violinist Hilary Hahn, he named Janine Jansen, Baiba Skride, Leonidas Kavakos, and (of course) Lang Lang. I think he got Hahn, […]
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Hierarchy of the Moment
The conductor Elena Schwarz grew up in Lugano, Switzerland, with parents who were both doctors specialized in internal medicine. Her recently work has emphasized contemporary music: she performed Olga Neuwirth at The Lucerne Festival, and Brian Ferneyhough in 2013 in Berlin, among other composers and ensembles. When we spoke on Skype, she spoke English fluently, […]
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Recurring Themes
Maintaining an active career performing with major orchestras around the world, Canadian-American violinist Leila Josefowicz has managed to walk the line between the expected standard repertoires for violin and orchestra and more daring new works. As a testament to this, over the past year, Leila has performed Sergei Prokofiev’s “Violin Concerto No. 1” (1917), Alban […]
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Purifying Harmonies
On a cold Monday morning, the German composer Sarah Nemtsov met up with me in our Berlin office for an interview. Yesterday, Ricordi Berlin formally announced the three winners of its composition competition RicordiLab: Nemtsov, Shiori Usui, and Steffen Wick. (The advisory board consisted of Liza Lim, Kristjan Järvi, Gillian Moore, and Dr. Clemens Trautmann.) […]
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Timelapse
For Intro, we speak with the musicians who don’t show up in press releases. We hope to portray a diversity of background and experience in classical music. This is the third interview in an ongoing series.When I thought of who I would Intro, Natalie Draper immediately came to mind. I spent the summer of 2015 […]
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Some Rawness
Lisa Renèe Coons is a composer, sound artist, and professor at Western Michigan University. Through the course of several emails exchanged in the last few weeks, just after her return from a residency at the MacDowell Colony, we discussed the difficulty of honoring one’s origins, music as a vehicle for dealing with the unspeakable, welding, […]
Posted inOpinion
Tacet Acceptance
In 2012, I embarked on a study of the classical music profession in the UK and Germany. I was interested in learning what it is like to work as a musician, the ups and downs of the profession, and how musicians deal with the often precarious nature of their work. Another issue that I wanted […]