Music

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

Beethoven; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Lewis Lockwood

Beethoven’s Empire of the Mind

March 26, 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

Nicholas Kenyon

What Matters in Music?

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

December 17, 2020 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

Matthew Aucoin

Opera at the Edge

Perhaps, in our newfound state of isolation, we can learn new ways to listen across borders, with open ears

May 14, 2020 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

The Latest

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

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

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

Fragments of a silk painting from the Astana Tombs, Xinjiang, China, circa 200–800

Larry Wolff

What China Sounded Like

September 24, 2020 issue

Suzanne (Marie-Clémentine) Valadon: The Violin Case, 1923

Ted Reichman

My Quarantine: One More Vibration

On March 6, 2020, one of the last days of what we might call normalcy, I bought a violin at a thrift store outside Boston.

August 15, 2020

Adam Shatz

In the Vanguard of Trio Jazz with Micah Thomas

The piano trio has always held a special place in my experience—and imagination—of jazz clubs. And the most exciting debut on record that I’ve heard in the last year is Micah Thomas’s trio, recorded live last spring at Kitano, a small club in New York.

May 29, 2020