Arts

Music

Sheer Love of the Music

Under the direction of Amelia Freedman, for sixty years the Nash Ensemble has both venerated chamber music’s history and embraced the shock of the new.

December 28, 2024

Jenny Uglow

Hallelujah!

In his book Every Valley, Charles King explains the enduring appeal of Handel’s Messiah since its premiere in Dublin nearly three hundred years ago.

December 19, 2024 issue

Peter E. Gordon

Music and Memory

After the Holocaust, classical composers explored music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty.

October 17, 2024 issue

Matthew Aucoin

Perpetual Expectation

The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s operas have a pervasive aura of waiting for something just out of sight, shrouded in veil upon veil.

May 23, 2024 issue

Joanna Biggs

‘Give Me Joy’

Madonna’s genius is not just for controversy, or for pressing on the fissures in femininity, or for her bold support of once-unpopular causes. It is for doing it all with no apology.

May 23, 2024 issue

Sam Huber

‘The Loudest, Brightest Thing’

The producer and DJ Sophie created a musical language with which to explore feelings too inchoate—too big, too raw—to be spoken.

November 24, 2024

J. Hoberman

The Beatles Effect

A new documentary treats the Fab Four’s Shea Stadium concert as a window into the dreams and nightmares of the summer of 1965.

October 12, 2024

Walker Mimms

Ted Lives!

The poet and visual artist Ted Joans found a kind of mystical power in jazz and surrealism alike.

October 2, 2024

The Music of Woodstock

Greil Marcus

The Brotherhood of Rock

“The Band had made, Robertson says, a brotherhood, and in the way that in the songs each man’s contribution shaded and jumped into every other’s, they acted out an ideal of democracy and equality.”

March 23, 2017 issue

Stephen Stills performing on the Dutch television program Toppop, 1972

Lorrie Moore

Ain’t It Always Stephen Stills

For a particular generation, the songs of Stephen Stills were marinated into our minds, our spines, our bones.

August 17, 2017 issue

Adam Shatz

The Beautiful Sounds of Jimi Hendrix

“Hendrix used a range of technological innovations (feedback, sustain, effects pedals) to expand the sound of the guitar, to make it ‘talk’ in ways that it never had.”

January 9, 2014 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Rock of Ages

“Music was scarcely the point by now: this was literature, theater, religion, noise opera, political action, erotic paradise.”

December 16, 1999 issue

The Latest

Philip Clark

All the Stops

The harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has spent much of his career in the crossfire between traditionalism and new directions.

April 13, 2025

Adam Shatz

‘Where Should the Birds Fly?’

The new record by the Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem reflects the fury, sorrow, and grief that the war on Gaza provoked in him.

March 27, 2025

Matthew Rivera

Frankie Newton: Lost and Found

A trove of newly discovered newspaper articles written by the trumpeter shines fresh light on his enigmatic life.

March 19, 2025

Nicolas Collins

An Open Call for Invention

A veteran composer of electronic music recalls his college introduction to John Cage and the composers who came after.

February 12, 2025

Andrew Katzenstein

Mode for Joe

The tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson was at once a vessel of tradition and a Romantic individualist, a consummate professional in an art form that lionized rebels.

September 6, 2024