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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Heads Will Roll
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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A Salvatore Sciarrino Playlist
“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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Trying To Crystallize Something
The first time that Siwan Rhys played Galina Ustvolskaya’s music in public, something strange happened. She’d been asked to play Ustvolskaya’s arresting Sixth Sonata at the launch of Kate Molleson’s book Sound Within Sound at Cafe OTO in Dalston. This wasn’t the first time that Rhys had encountered Ustvolskaya’s musical worldview—she’d first heard it live […]
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epistle; possessive
I. At 12:27 on September 30, you wrote me three lines that read “Just caught TV glimpses of dreadful flooding in New York.Hope you are OK.M xx” I replied only much later, half-past, (you, surely asleep) My darling M,(Will I ever stop using that ‘my’?)— And though you didn’t know it—how could I have expected you […]
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Intuitive Refrains
“I want to build a new tradition, an aural tradition, transmitted via the ears,” Karlheinz Stockhausen declared in 1971. Such a tradition, he insisted, would avoid treating “the materials of music as separate from the process of composition” and would be “based on the direct experience of working with sounds rather than writing on paper.” […]
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Urgent Attention
Hear that? It’s the sound of a composer’s music changing. Timothy McCormack’s “you actually are evaporating” for violin and cello begins with a rapid flicker of timbres. Microtonal double stops, coarse strokes deep in the strings, laconic glissandi, the occasional single note, flit past. Ear and brain reach for the pattern. This is beautiful music […]
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The Things We Form
It is afternoon in Berlin. Sarah Saviet is not meant to be here. She is meant to be hiking, unreachable in the woods in Spain, but, change of plans, she’s here, playing Bach: in her living room, an afternoon in Berlin. And so we meet. We talk, and we do not cover everything. She is […]
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A Lovers’ Discourse
Evan Johnson is a composer; he thinks about sound. But Evan Johnson is also the rare composer who thinks just as much about sight. It’s true that, to the ear, his music is often extremely affecting in its tightrope delicacy, but that aural richness is only a happy consequence of an opulent visual field: his […]
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The Threshold of Change
Juliet Fraser is on sabbatical. “Actually,” she corrects me, “it’s a semi-sabbatical”—she’s still performing, but only sparingly. Mostly, she’s taking some long-overdue time to breathe, and to devote more attention to her other spinning plates. (She keeps several in the air, no matter the season.) When I call her early on a Friday morning, she […]