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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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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Ours is the age of themes. Drowning in the deluge of streaming content whose rush, flow, and surge defines what Anna Kornbluh last year termed our too-late capitalism, any and all aspirant media—entertainment, art, or otherwise—is increasingly compliant with that dictatorial imperative handed down from marketing departments on high: brand or bust. Streamlined themes get […]

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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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Thirty years ago, Queering the Pitch loosed one of the most powerful institutional revisions in musicology’s long and anxious history. Published in January of 1994, the book posed a forceful injunction to the field at large: Queerness—with all its social and political ramifications—could and would no longer be ignored by the ivied academies of Western […]

The post Sounds Gay, I’m In appeared first on VAN Magazine.

All eyes have been on Detroit in recent years, where Yuval Sharon’s much-profiled tenure at the rebranded Detroit Opera has turned into a case study for new models of opera’s cultural relevance in regional America. News outlets and commentators have been generous in covering his stewardship, highlighting Sharon’s audaciously modern programming and unorthodox concepts—not to […]

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I. I had come to Munich searching for an archive I wasn’t sure was there. This was several years ago now, back when I was still fumbling toward a book on post-war opera—something about its relation to genre, history, and mourning; the sketches are still tucked in a drawer somewhere—and at the time, Munich was […]

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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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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 […]

The post A Lovers’ Discourse appeared first on VAN Magazine.

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 […]

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