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Music

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

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

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

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

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

The Latest

George B. Stauffer

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

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

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

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