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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In his dazzling, fragmentary book A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes wrote, “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.” When I first encountered this analogy in my early 20s, I felt somehow relieved. I […]

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It’s that time of year again: The Eurovision Song Contest is just around the corner, coming to grace (or haunt) television screens across Europe and beyond on May 11. What began as an experiment in transnational broadcasting in 1956 has since become a global cultural phenomenon in which camp and geopolitics intertwine. Eurovision, now in […]

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Back when Twitter was still (somewhat) good, someone by the user name @Swaefastide posted a portrait of Lord Byron, in traditional Albanian costume, with the caption, “I will NEVER apologize for being a wildly successful alpha male,” lampooning the words of Trump-endorsed author Nick Adams. Non-Trump-endorsed author Ryan Ruby took the parody one step further, […]

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On film, characters go to the opera house for meetings, espionage, or murder; operas can bring about moments of revelation, connection, or catharsis. They progress the plot or add texture to the lived-in dimensions of the film’s world. But the best uses of opera in film boost something under the surface, and even add additional […]

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The 2014 EuroArts documentary portrait of Maurizio Pollini, “De main de maître,” opens with a literal portrait: that of the pianist’s great-uncle. The interviewer mistakes the painting for Pollini himself. Pollini recounts the life of his forbear: “He ran away from home when he was 16, in 1800, joined Garibaldi’s army, and took part in […]

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Over the last few months, I found myself unexpectedly steeped in George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” while working on “American Rhapsody,” a documentary about the work’s centennial for BBC Radio 3. Part of me said yes to the project because I thought that it would be a nice diversion from the dumpster fire of real […]

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Every year, when stores clear their shelves of Christmas kitsch and bring out Valentine’s Day paraphernalia, I feel what must be post-industrial existential dread. Paper plates send out X’s and O’s. Companies I’ve never heard of peddle plaques, keychains, and jewelry that can be “personalized.” My social media feeds suggest romantic dinners and getaway experiences […]

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Luigi Nono would have turned 100 on January 29. He was born, raised, and died in Venice, whose tradition of separate choirs performing from different places within the church had a profound impact on the composer’s sense of sound, space, and silence. Despite this relationship with the past, few musical oeuvres have quite as palpable […]

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Some pieces of music burst into life with feats of virtuosic daring; others rumble up from the bowels of the earth; some loom over you hieratically. Many beginnings are defined by some brilliant melodic gesture: Strauss’s “Don Juan,” for instance, scales the orchestra with a kind of priapic triumph.  As a miserable year comes to […]

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