It is a medical axiom that if a doctor doesn’t bring their humanity with them to work, they won’t find it on the way home. Where doctors find their particular brand of humanism—the kind that drives them toward suffering—is a mystery. But many have looked for it in music. Edward Jenner, discoverer of the smallpox […]
Tag: Music & Health
Posted inPlaylist
The Best Opening Chords in Classical Music
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 […]
Posted inInterview
“It’s Only Music, After All”
My first proper encounter with Philip Thomas’s playing came through his box set of Morton Feldman’s piano music, released on the label Another Timbre in 2019. The performances are intimate to the point of sensuality, every gesture like a phantom hand hovering above the tiny hairs on your arm, in that fragile space between presence […]
Posted inEssay
A Chained Man’s Bruise
“You get this idea of someone knowing that something is not right,” experimental vocalist Elaine Mitchener says of Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King.” “It’s askew. You know the headache you have when you have a migraine—you can’t actually see something in front of the eye? That’s how I feel with this: […]
Posted inInterview
“Stop Touring, Take Mushrooms”
Pekka Kuusisto and I have turned up to the interview looking vaguely similar. Two pairs of glasses, lots of short, dark-blond hair, and two not dissimilar jumpers meet on the screen: mine, a sludge-green skiing fleece borrowed from my dad; his, a bottle-green Icelandic-knit sweater made by his mother-in-law during lockdown. Kuusisto is an intense […]
Posted inInterview
Pain and Transfiguration
Often the most interesting nuggets of interviews arrive when questioning dissolves into chatting. “Sorry, that previous answer was a bit wishy-washy,” Robin Ticciati says on reflection: Following the tenor David Butt Philip’s recent Times of London interview, where he advised young UK singers to head abroad for the betterment of their careers post-Brexit, I’d asked […]
Posted inEssay
“I Don’t Know Why I’m Angry, I’m Angry, I’m Angry…”
“Almost one year since the escalation of the war in Ukraine, a generation of children has experienced 12 months of violence, fear, loss, and tragedy,” wrote the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on February 21. According to the organization’s most recent statistics, at least 438 children have been killed by acts of war, with 842 […]
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 inEssay
Living in the Elsewhere
Some years ago, I found myself stranded in a guesthouse in the Scottish Highlands after an unexpected storm put an end to my hiking plans. As I buttoned up my coat by the door, the lady who ran the establishment asked me where I was headed. I’d intended to find a fireside drink to salvage […]
Posted inReport
The Pitch of Living
“I’ve been interested in the 432 Hz conspiracy theories for a while,” began an email from my editor at VAN. “Would you like to spend some time using the 432 Player, a website that adjusts all your music to 432 Hz?” I consider myself a very online person, and yet, through a mixture of willful […]