Posted inPlaylist

Off-Site Eden

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 […]

Posted inProfile

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 […]

Posted inEssay

Sounds Gay, I’m In

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 […]

Posted inProfile

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 […]

Posted inReview

Scouse Glyndebourne

It’s hard to approach events like “ENO does Eurovision” without a bit of skepticism, but I realize I might be going about things too cynically as I arrive in Liverpool in my Tár-inspired spring transition look: black trousers, black trench coat, black baseball cap, black sneakers, and a thick black jumper. I feel like a […]

Posted inInterview

A Point in the Soul

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Brian Greis, a retired obstetrician-gynecologist who lives with his husband in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, attended some 200 classical concerts a year and spent up to eight out of 12 months on the road traveling to attend performances. Greis never harbored serious ambitions of being a classical musician, but since his childhood […]

Posted inHistory

Caller of Spirits

When pianist Mark Austin began researching composer Peter Warlock, ahead of recording an album of his songs with the mezzo-soprano Anna Harvey, Austin focussed on the music and not the life. “I started to read a biography of Warlock and I got about halfway through,” he says. “This is unusual for me, as I’m normally […]