Alex Ross's Blog

Martinů

The Chameleon. The New Yorker, Sept. 15, 2025.

Twilight of the blogs

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For twenty-one years, I've been writing miscellaneous items in this space, courtesy of the simple and elegant blogging service Typepad. Sadly, Typepad has announced that it will shut down at the end of the month. I've been studying how to move my motley online output to another location. With hundreds of audio files, thousands of images, and over a million words, it's not a simple task. The process may take a while, but I hope at least to transplant in short order the book-related audio guides, which readers still seem to find useful. I'm grateful to all those who have followed my jottings here over the years.

Tarkovsky's Faustus film

In 1973, Tarkovsky was pondering an adaptation of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, as his diaries report: "I am taking on an immense burden. Mann's Doctor Faustus is an elaborate amalgam of the author's past life, his shattered hopes, longing for his lost homeland, thoughts about suffering, about the torments of the artist, about his sinfulness. On the one hand he (the artist) is an ordinary person. On the other he cannot be ordinary, and consequently he pays for his talent with his soul. Talent is not given to man by God; rather man is doomed to carry the cross of talent. For the artist is a being who strives (but not in secret or in hiding, nor moving in circles, nor in the spaciousness of some kind of ecological niche) to master ultimate truth. The artist masters that truth every time he creates something perfect, something whole. But here one is assailed by a thousand other sounds, a thousand other questions. It is important to compare the man who is looking for the truth with the man who ignores it, or is simply not interested. Probably our Committee will simply not give me this work; so I shall have to fight for it."

If anyone could have filmed the unfilmable...

The view from Blue Heights Drive

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A memorable day and night at Galka Scheyer's.

Robin on Riley

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Will Robin makes a welcome return to The New Yorker with an assessment of Terry Riley's classic Columbia albums.

The stark truth

Garrett Graff: "The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed."

Martinů shelf

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More Newlin

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The fifteen-year-old Dika Newlin greets the nine-year-old Lorin Maazel after a performance of her Cradle Song in 1939.

(A) Schoenberg in Life

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The composer was immensely proud of his son's tennis achievements, although he did become uneasy when he found that in some circles he was known mainly as "Ronny's father."

Dika Newlin, in and out of recital

The University of North Texas Digital Library has made available some materials relating to the singular Dika Newlin, who began her musical career as a child-prodigy student of Schoenberg and ended as a punk-rock performance artist, with many notable publications, provocations, and pedagogical achievements in between. Especially striking is a 1972 recital that begins somewhat normally, with an eclectic grouping of Joplin, Feldman, and Ives; ventures into the electronic-experimental, with works by Julia Morrison and Newlin herself; and finally leaps into the absurd, with a pseudo-Babbitty lecture on "Serial Music" and a rendition of Cage's 4'33" that goes completely off the rails. Broken chords, Newlin tells us, are "non-simultaneous simultaneities."