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

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

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

Nicholas Kenyon

What Matters in Music?

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

December 17, 2020 issue

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

Pierre Boulez; illustration by Tom Bachtell

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

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

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