Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Music

Dan Chiasson

This Ain’t No Disco

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

March 25, 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

Chris Wayne performing with Sugar Minnott’s Youth Promotion soundsystem, Jamaica, 1985

Erin MacLeod

Death and Dancehall

The assertion of the dead into the sphere of the living is evident throughout the island, but there’s a particular element of Jamaican culture that demonstrates it most powerfully, and that is the foundation of Jamaican music: the soundsystem.

May 22, 2019

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

Lewis Lockwood

Beethoven’s Empire of the Mind

March 26, 2020 issue

Richard Wagner; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

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

Dmitri Shostakovich with Anatoly Alexandrov, the author’s grandfather, Novorossiysk, Russia, 1961

Anastasia Edel

Shostakovich and the Chimes of Novorossiysk

Like Shostakovich’s native Leningrad, Novorossiysk had suffered terribly during World War II. As the news of the war memorial’s musical innovation spread through the city, more people came and stayed for hours. My grandfather’s voice must have grown hoarse as he recited the story of the Chimes’ creation.

April 8, 2019

The Latest

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

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