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
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
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
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
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
