Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Music

For our print subscribers: Deliveries of mail during the holidays from an overwhelmed US Postal Service have been inordinately slow. Our latest issue—the January 14 issue—was mailed on December 28. We know that some subscribers have still not received their issues and we hope and expect the issues to be delivered to everyone soon. Read the January 14 issue here.

Nicholas Kenyon

What Matters in Music?

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

December 17, 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

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

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

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

Accra Shepp

An Interview with Archie Shepp

My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, was a revolutionary, both musically and politically.

September 29, 2020

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

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

The Latest

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

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

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

Larry Wolff

What China Sounded Like

September 24, 2020 issue

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

Jeanne Lee performing at the Banlieues Bleues Festival, Seine-Saint-Denis, France, 1997

Adam Shatz

An Invitation from Jeanne Lee

June 11, 2020 issue

Headie One performing at O2 Academy Brixton, London, November 10, 2019

Tiana Reid

My Quarantine: More Time Now?

Despite the assumption, hostile to me, that we have “more time now,” I still prefer television shows under thirty minutes.

May 21, 2020

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

Beethoven; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Lewis Lockwood

Beethoven’s Empire of the Mind

March 26, 2020 issue

Joyce DiDonato as Agrippina and Matthew Rose as Claudio in Handel’s Agrippina at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, 2020

James Romm

The Winking Satire of ‘Agrippina’

Agrippina, the Handel opera now premiering on the Metropolitan Opera’s stage, may have been written as a satire on the politics of its own time, but in the hands of producer Sir David McVicar, and set in the present day, it offers a timely paradigm of hypocrisy, corruption, and sexual manipulation in the halls of power.

March 1, 2020