Arts

Music

The Atonal Genie

Arnold Schoenberg’s music still challenges listeners, but his twelve-tone technique turns up in all sorts of unexpected places, from horror film scores to cartoons to jazz.

June 12, 2025 issue

Adam Shatz

‘Where Should the Birds Fly?’

The new record by the Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem reflects the fury, sorrow, and grief that the war on Gaza provoked in him.

March 27, 2025

Matthew Rivera

Frankie Newton: Lost and Found

A trove of newly discovered newspaper articles written by the trumpeter shines fresh light on his enigmatic life.

March 19, 2025

Geoffrey O’Brien

Eddying Toward Doom

Any adaptation of Moby-Dick must pick and choose from the novel’s many themes and tones; Jake Heggie’s opera tends toward a frequency attuned to sorrow.

May 15, 2025 issue

Joseph Horowitz

Grand Opera’s Tribulations

This season’s production of Aida at the Met sheds light on issues facing both the company and the genre of grand opera itself.

May 29, 2025 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Furious Stasis

Verdi’s sprawling opera La Forza del Destino draws its power from asymmetry, arbitrary juxtapositions, and extreme situations.

April 18, 2024 issue

Philip Clark

All the Stops

The harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has spent much of his career in the crossfire between traditionalism and new directions.

April 13, 2025

Larry Wolff

Those Who Live in the Dark

A recent production of The Threepenny Opera recovered the work’s emphasis on subversive anarchism and destructive sexuality.

May 10, 2025

On Songwriting

Mark Ford

She Shampooed & Renewed Us

For those who dreamed upward in the late 1960s, there was not only Woodstock, there was also its commemoration by Mitchell in her optimistic paean to the festival’s significance in her song of the same name.

October 26, 2017 issue

Lucy Sante

Dylan’s Time

Dylan, through his ambiguity, his ability to throw down puzzles that continue to echo and to generate interpretations, almost singlehandedly created a climate in which lyrics were taken seriously.

October 13, 2016

Daniel Drake

Paul Simon: Fathers, Sons, Troubled Water

Paul Simon’s emotive, androgynous tenor and sensitive, imagistic songwriting have sustained a sixty-year career in American pop music that came to a close in September with three farewell concerts.

October 13, 2018

Jon Pareles

Swept Away by Springsteen

For a generation or two of listeners, Springsteen has been rock’s steadfast working-class hero, the self-made superstar who never forgot where he came from and a flesh-and-blood affirmation of tenacity against long odds.

December 22, 2016 issue

The Latest

Poorna Swami

Our Nusrat

The Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan earned fans the world over. For decades they have debated just what he stood for.

June 16, 2025

Nicolas Collins

An Open Call for Invention

A veteran composer of electronic music recalls his college introduction to John Cage and the composers who came after.

February 12, 2025

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Sheer Love of the Music

Under the direction of Amelia Freedman, for sixty years the Nash Ensemble has both venerated chamber music’s history and embraced the shock of the new.

December 28, 2024

Jenny Uglow

Hallelujah!

In his book Every Valley, Charles King explains the enduring appeal of Handel’s Messiah since its premiere in Dublin nearly three hundred years ago.

December 19, 2024 issue

Sam Huber

‘The Loudest, Brightest Thing’

The producer and DJ Sophie created a musical language with which to explore feelings too inchoate—too big, too raw—to be spoken.

November 24, 2024

J. Hoberman

The Beatles Effect

A new documentary treats the Fab Four’s Shea Stadium concert as a window into the dreams and nightmares of the summer of 1965.

October 12, 2024

Walker Mimms

Ted Lives!

The poet and visual artist Ted Joans found a kind of mystical power in jazz and surrealism alike.

October 2, 2024

Peter E. Gordon

Music and Memory

After the Holocaust, classical composers explored music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty.

October 17, 2024 issue

Andrew Katzenstein

Mode for Joe

The tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson was at once a vessel of tradition and a Romantic individualist, a consummate professional in an art form that lionized rebels.

September 6, 2024