“As I have said on many occasions,” the composer Alexander Goehr begins the fourth chapter of his book with Jack Van Zandt, “I believe that, for the most part, the period of time when a teacher or mentor has an influential relationship with a young composer is short and typically compressed into a time span […]
Category: Pages Turned
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Through the Rubble
There’s a decent case for Felix Mendelssohn being the most important figure in the history of Western classical music, though primarily for the music he programmed, rather than for the music he wrote. Answering the impassioned cry of Bach’s biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel for an increased visibility of masterpieces if music wished to be taken […]
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Confrontations
“It’s a bit of a shame that there is no confrontation anymore,” Nuria Schoenberg Nono reflected in an interview with Wolfgang Schaufler, a publisher at Vienna’s Universal Edition. “Everything is in order today; [audiences] only have enthusiasm for the great interpreters, and that is right—but the music itself often has little or nothing to do […]
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Background History
The first thing that stands out in Philip Ewell’s On Music Theory And Making Music More Welcoming For Everyone is how specific the music theory world is. His thesis concerns structural issues as he experiences them: the pursuit of tenure, the peer-review process for the Society of Music Theory, critiques of foreign-language requirements for graduate […]
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Neither Peak nor Trough
At university, a composition lecturer once described his artistic endeavor as freeing “music from the baggage of serious high art music, without actually throwing away the bags.” A similar description applies to the classical music publishing industry today: discarding the baggage accumulated by “history of music” books of old, while retaining the means with which […]
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In The Sonorous Air
It’s my first time visiting Berlin in springtime. Incapable of shaping my own destiny, I find a tongue-in-cheek itinerary for a couple of politics-themed hours in the German capital, designed for irony-addled people with time to burn. I decide to follow the plan with slavish sincerity, heading from Alexanderplatz down Karl-Marx-Allee towards Cafe Sibylle, a […]
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Aesthetic Camouflage
What do you do?” The Outline asked in 2019. “I’m a podcaster–vlogger–model–DJ,” they replied, rhetorically and hyphenatedly. The gig economy has brought with it a host of new containers (like the egregious “multi-hyphenate”) to describe artists who traverse multiple creative pursuits—artists who a generation ago might have been called a dandy, a flâneur, or, more […]
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Fabric of Her World
“As with Ethel, Rebecca’s friendships were the very fabric of her world,” writes the musicologist Leah Broad in Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World. Queer academia’s gleeful dismantling of history’s “just friends” trope has ventured as far as the Gen Z mainstream, with Atlanta TikToker Oublaire’s sage reminder that “History Hates Lovers.” (“Historians […]
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Pianist of the Century
“Igor Levit’s career is a stark demonstration of the dissolving of boundaries between art and commerce, journalism and public relations,” wrote Hartmut Welscher in an article for VAN in 2020. One can add publishing to the ever-growing list of formats whose traditional ethical boundaries Levit has blurred, as House Concert, written by Florian Zinnecker under […]