Culture Wars
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Featured
Notes on Boulez
The history of music proceeds from Bach, through Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, and then via Schoenberg and Webern to Stockhausen and me. All else is irrelevant. —Pierre Boulez More of this type of cultural warfare can be found in Orientations (Harvard University Press, 1986). It is the core idea of modernism: music history as one single line…
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Featured
The Red Roots of Folk Music
The project of European high modernism in music has not looked kindly on “insular” rummaging forays into local folk music, especially on the Celtic fringe. The very localism of this instinct is an affront to the cosmopolitan sophistication which the international avant-garde was to develop over time.
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I remember seeing the Indian women with babies wrapped about them quietly contemplating Beethoven’s 7th.
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Featured
Culture War Redux
As a young artist during the 1950s, I immediately got the point of modernism.
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Featured
The Abduction of Opera
Will the New York Metropolitan Opera’s greatest gift to the world continue?
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Tonality is constantly renewing itself in defiance of an academic orthodoxy that denies its right to exist.
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Featured
A Blight at the Opera
Carlos Ott has provided the Parisian public with the architectural equivalent of bread and water.
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Featured
The Assault on Opera
What modern producers seem to forget is that audiences are gifted with the faculty of imagination.
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What we could do in the face of the upheaval and heartbreak of a city in turmoil?
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Featured
In Defense of Elitism
There’s a danger if every public decision is made by the majority for the majority.