Music

Alban Berg’s Dissonances

Berg’s music, with its lyrical combination of tonal and atonal techniques, is closer to late Romanticism than to the strict modernism of his contemporaries Schoenberg and Webern.

June 23, 2022 issue

Simon Callow

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pianist

Jeremy Denk’s memoir is not just about piano lessons but about life lessons—how the artist creates a self.

April 21, 2022 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Verdi’s Decentered Epic

The six principal characters of Don Carlos grasp at separate ends, but nothing is finally to be attained.

April 21, 2022 issue

Adam Kirsch

Black Voices, German Song

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?

February 10, 2022 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Notes from Underground

Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s new opera recasts the Orphic myth with Eurydice as the central character.

January 13, 2022 issue

Greil Marcus

A Ride on the Velvet Underground

Revolving around Lou Reed and John Cale, Todd Haynes’s documentary on the avant-garde rock band is itself an art project in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

November 18, 2021

Adam Shatz

Coltrane’s New ‘Love Supreme’

The studio version has long been recognized as the jazz saxophonist’s masterwork. But a recently unearthed live recording is nothing short of a revelation.

October 7, 2021

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

On Songwriting

Mark Ford

She Shampooed & Renewed Us

For those who dreamed upward in the late 1960s, there was not only Woodstock, there was also its commemoration by Mitchell in her optimistic paean to the festival’s significance in her song of the same name.

October 26, 2017 issue

Lucy Sante

Dylan’s Time

Dylan, through his ambiguity, his ability to throw down puzzles that continue to echo and to generate interpretations, almost singlehandedly created a climate in which lyrics were taken seriously.

October 13, 2016

Paul Simon with his son Harper, June 7, 1973

Daniel Drake

Paul Simon: Fathers, Sons, Troubled Water

Paul Simon’s emotive, androgynous tenor and sensitive, imagistic songwriting have sustained a sixty-year career in American pop music that came to a close in September with three farewell concerts.

October 13, 2018

Bruce Springsteen performing at the Bottom Line, New York City, August 1975

Jon Pareles

Swept Away by Springsteen

For a generation or two of listeners, Springsteen has been rock’s steadfast working-class hero, the self-made superstar who never forgot where he came from and a flesh-and-blood affirmation of tenacity against long odds.

December 22, 2016 issue

The Latest

Larry Wolff

The Struggle Over Verdi

The mood of urgency and unease in La Forza del Destino—the opening performance of this year’s Parma Verdi Festival—also hangs over Italy ahead of Sunday’s national elections.

September 24, 2022

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Endless Summer

Brian Wilson’s songs still have the power to astonish on their own terms, from their own time.

October 6, 2022 issue

Tim Page

Playing Together

In the late 1980s, when composers and audiences moved in deeply divided circles, Bang on a Can’s commitment to diverse programming began to break down the divisions within contemporary music.

November 18, 2021 issue

Larry Wolff

A Halo of Nostalgia

The frivolous charms of Viennese operetta helped preserve a sense of Habsburg identity after the breakup of the empire.

November 4, 2021 issue

Matthew Aucoin

The More Fraught the Better

Throughout The Rake’s Progress, the steady friction between Stravinsky’s music and Auden’s poetry creates a musico-poetic compound that brims with energy and life.

October 21, 2021 issue

Adam Kirsch

Turbulent Music, Turbulent Life

Lewis Lockwood’s survey of the history of Beethoven biography shows that our understanding of the music has always been profoundly shaped by the stories we tell about the man.

September 23, 2021 issue

James Romm

A Journey into Homer’s World

The classicist Milman Parry’s quest for the sources of Homeric epic led him in the 1930s to the Yugoslavian bards who sang in coffeehouses and bars much as he imagined Homer did.

September 23, 2021 issue

Lorrie Moore

The Inspired Bricolage of Bruno Mars

The pop artist is sometimes disparaged as a charismatic impersonator of others’ music, but that misses his talent for truly inhabiting what he borrows and making something moving and new.

July 2, 2021

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