Opening scene from “Romeo and Juliet,” Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, Boston MA What is the point of making beautiful things, or of cherishing the beauty of the past, when ugliness runs rampant? Those who work in the realm of the arts have been asking themselves that question in recent weeks. The election of Donald Trump, and […]
Alex Ross
- Art Making
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Setting Aside the Familiar
Composer John Adams Much of what I do each day feels difficult to describe. For those of us who spend a lot of time alone in the studio, it is often hard to know what’s really going on. I am grateful when I find others who can language some of these emotions and experiences. And […]
- Aesthetics
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The Proud and Futile Wake
Continuing the theme of music and its multifarious explorations… I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck. –Samuel Beckett, Molloy What an evocative quote to start Alex Ross‘ most recent book, Listen to This. His columns in The […]
Meredith Monk, In Eternia
Photo: Meredith Monk A last four minutes of Meredith Monk’s most recent performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music of Songs of Ascensionhas been posted on Alex Ross’ (The New Yorker) blog. From Ross: The video excerpt…comes from the final section of the work: first Monk delivers a solo, accompanying herself on a shruti box, […]
- Art Making
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With You or Without You
There’s a perennially prickly relationship that persists between the artist who has an audience and the one who does not. In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross returns to this theme many times as it played out between the giants of 20th century composing. Schoenberg “warned his colleagues against a futile chase after popularity,” and […]
Pandemonium in G Major
I love this guy. Alex Ross writes about music for The New Yorker. He is so reliably brilliant, and my musician sister Rebecca and I both turn to his articles first when the magazine arrives at our respective homes. Then we call and talk about the nuance he captured or yet another poignant insight. His […]