Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Music

Nicholas Kenyon

What Matters in Music?

The musicologist Richard Taruskin has lost none of his zest for controversy.

December 17, 2020 issue

Adam Shatz

A Blues Surrealist

Julius Hemphill’s music uses stark, lyrical abstraction and svelte dissonances to confront the vicissitudes of black American life.

May 27, 2021 issue

Dan Chiasson

This Ain’t No Disco

Talking Heads were at once a party band and an art project.

March 25, 2021 issue

Simon Callow

A Taste for the Difficult

In his performing, his critical writing, and his conversation, the prodigious Charles Rosen was driven by ceaseless curiosity and the urge to share his knowledge.

February 11, 2021 issue

Jed Perl

The Cults of Wagner

Alex Ross’s ‘Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music’

October 8, 2020 issue

Ming Smith: Sun Ra Space II, New York City, 1978

Namwali Serpell

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

The photographer Ming Smith’s pictures of Sun Ra from 1978 beautifully capture his energy.

July 23, 2020 issue

Accra Shepp

An Interview with Archie Shepp

My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, was a revolutionary, both musically and politically.

September 29, 2020

Greil Marcus

The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”

December 3, 2020 issue

The Latest

Sean Wilentz

Bob Dylan, Historian

Across the six decades of his career, the singer-songwriter has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present.

June 19, 2021

Matthew Aucoin

A Dance to the Music of Death

Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape.

May 13, 2021 issue

Namwali Serpell

The Ecstatic Internet

“Many of us have found a contingent online community of funny, smart black people from across the diaspora, one that isn’t necessarily available to us IRL.”

March 27, 2021

Namwali Serpell

Black Hole

Black pussy is our absent center. It is everywhere and nowhere on the Internet.

March 26, 2021

Mark O’Connell

Old Midlands Giants

The comedian Stewart Lee’s documentary King Rocker is about a musician who seems impossible to mythologize.

April 8, 2021 issue

Larry Wolff

Phantasms of the Opera

The invention of gas illumination offered operagoers in the mid-nineteenth century “a completely new experience of light” that reshaped operatic composition and performance.

March 11, 2021 issue

Sean Wilentz

The Lost World of the Jazz Club

It was an era when this milieu of popular music seemed to herald a now-distant promise of what American life might be.

December 23, 2020

Pierre Boulez; illustration by Tom Bachtell

Matthew Aucoin

The Fury of Pierre Boulez

A collection of his lectures on music reveals the composer’s narrow-mindedness and disdain.

November 5, 2020 issue

Adam Shatz

Memories of a Mentor and Friend

The writer and critic on how he and Stanley Crouch bonded over a shared love of jazz.

September 26, 2020

Stanley Crouch playing drums at the Jazz Journalists Association awards at B.B. King’s, New York City, 2004

Adam Shatz

The Stanley Crouch I Knew

What Stanley believed in, I think, was calling things as he saw them even if it meant speaking hard truths, which used to be the business of critics. He left a number of bruises.

September 24, 2020