Can you name a monumental four-opera series that brings together an extended, related cast of characters involved in mysterious and spiritual quests? How about a Great American Novel? Now, how about an artist who created both? The answer is the great American composer Robert Ashley, who died in 2014 just shy of his 84th birthday, […]
Author Archives: George Grella
Posted inEssay
The Black Modernism of American Music
How many years should pass, in polite society, before a country is allowed to have its own national style of classical music? In 1939, over 150 years after the Declaration of Independence, Leonard Bernstein began his senior thesis at Harvard with the statement, “I propose a new and vital American nationalism.” In the essay, “The […]
Posted inInterview
“We Disrupt What We Love”
On November 30, the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of “Tannhäuser,” we had reached the engrossing song contest in the Wartburg Castle from Act II. Baritone Christian Gerhaher, making his house debut in the role of Wolfram, was singing “Blick’ ich umher,” the character’s song on courtly love. As the music and libretto […]
Posted inInterview
Tender Transitions
Nicole Mitchell is a leading flutist in jazz, a player with one of the strongest senses of swing there is, either inside a beat or playing freely. Her thematic albums and projects like “Mandorla Awakening” and “EarthSeed” are inspired by, and develop, Afrofuturist ideas that she first discovered through the great speculative fiction writer Octavia […]
Posted inInterview
The Beautiful Moment
Wadada Leo Smith plays the trumpet with a brilliant, forceful sound and has been a major creative figure in jazz for over 50 years. This century, his importance and prominence as a composer have grown. His beautiful and moving large-scale piece, “Ten Freedom Summers,” made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in […]
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Reserve and Release
Jeremy Denk may not have as high a profile as other classical pianists, but he has a deep range of accomplishments both inside and outside of music. Last year, Nonesuch released his latest recording: Mozart Piano Concertos with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (he plays No. 20 and 25, and the Rondo in A minor, […]
Posted inI Know, But
I Know, But: Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9
When I was in graduate school, I took an advanced musicianship class, which mainly demonstrated that I was not an advanced musician. One of the components was ear training and dictation. Our task was usually to notate a series of dense chords and tricky modulations the teacher played from the piano. One class, she played […]
Posted inReport
How to Eat
One chapter in Virgil Thomson’s 1939 book, The State of Music, is titled “How Composers Eat, or Who Does What to Whom and Who Gets Paid.” Thomson identified the subsequent means both clearly and derisively: “A surprisingly large number of composers are men of private fortune… the number of those who have married their money […]
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Live, From New York
As I write this the first weekend in May, the rate of new COVID-19 cases here in New York City, where some 20 percent of the population has caught the virus, has remained level for a week. Far from the recent peaks of infection and death, the numbers are nowhere near what’s needed to return […]
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Electronic Intimacy
On 8 p.m. Thursday, March 12, pianist Simone Dinnerstein and musicians—mezzo-soprano Kady Evanshyn, violinist Rebecca Fischer, oboist Alecia Lawyer, and the ensemble Baroklyn—were to take the stage at Miller Theatre and play music by J.S. Bach: “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” for piano solo; the Concerto for Violin and Oboe in C minor, BWV 1060; […]