Category: Uncategorized

  • Batter My Heart

    (J. Robert Oppenheimer) How does contemporary art music respond to the moral problems of the age? John Adams wrote the opera Doctor Atomic, about the Manhattan Project — the top-secret World War II initiative to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis could — in 2005. The libretto is by Peter Sellars, whom you will remember…

  • Is it Composed? Is it Improvised?

    George Crumb (1929 – ) wrote Apparition, a song cycle for soprano and amplified piano, in 1979. The text is taken from Walt Whitman’s elegy on the death of Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” considered one of the greatest of all American poems. Crumb used the following excerpts from the poem: The night in…

  • From the Village to the Concert Hall

    Bartók recording folk music. His subject sings into the horn of an Edison phonograph, which incised a cylinder disk with a needle. Bela Bartók was one of the earliest ethnomusicologists. Here is a field recording he made of Romanian folk dances. Here is his piano composition entitle Romanian Folk Dances. Here is a folk song he…

  • Pierrot

    Pierrot and Harlequin (Pablo Picasso, 1920). Pierrot is one of the stock characters of commedia dell’arte, an improvised form of theater that was performed by traveling players throughout Italy and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is a sad clown, in love with the stock heroine of commedia, Colombina (Columbine), who in turn is…

  • The Alliances that Led to WWI

    Europe in 1914. The multiple alliances that led to the European conflagration This sums it up:    

  • Wagner is Metal

    Wagner’s music and aesthetics have been extremely influential on various modern subcultures and fandoms. As one fan wrote about the opera Die Walküre:  “Black Metal Is Wagner.” The metal band Apocalyptica reimagines Wagner’s life: As Sir Christopher Lee noted, “Metal is a direct evolution of the sounds Wagner imagined.” Just to make worlds collide even harder: J.R.R.…

  • The Problem with Wagner

    As you will recall, Robert Schumann founded and edited the influential music magazine Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.  In 1850, the Neue Zeitschrift published an essay by a pseudonymous author called “Das Judentum in der Music” (Jewishness in Music), which alleged that Jews, being not only culturally and religiously different, but also biologically — that is, racially — different from gentile Germans,…

  • Rheingold

    Not this Rheingold. Das Rheingold (1869) is the first of the four operas in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The plot of the Ring Cycle, which takes about 20 hours to perform, explained in two minutes: The Prelude (Vorspiel), or overture, of Das Rheingold, the first opera in the Ring Cycle, is astonishing, even heard 150 years later. The…

  • Romanticism in Italy

    Italia and Germania (Friedrich Overbeck, 1828): allegorical figures of the two countries — neither of which was at that time a unified nation — meet in friendship. The German-speaking lands were fertile ground for Romanticism, in part because of cultural resistance to all things French in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. To speak of “German…

  • Classical Music Can Save Your Life

    It saved this violist’s life during the Great Depression. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen told the great African-American mezzo-soprano Barbara Conrad in the 1970s that her singing might make the difference between life and death for someone in the audience. Miss Conrad was one of the students who broke the color barrier at the University of…