Alex Ross's Blog, page 20

An Arash Yazdani moment

For Alexei Navalny

Another George Lewis moment

George E. Lewis · Disputatio (2023), for 16 instruments

Shall I compare thee to an Alban Berg Valentine?

"Where the graves of my love are, it is still."

                    — "Schattenleben," Jugendlieder

Previously: An Alban Berg Valentine, Another Alban Berg Valentine, Yet Another Alban Berg Valentine, Return of Alban Berg Valentine, Nothing says forever like an Alban Berg Valentine, Alban Berg Valentine (10th anniversary edition), Alban Berg Valentine (2017 edition), Will you be my Alban Berg Valentine?, Eternity, by Alban Berg Valentine, My Bloody Alban Berg Valentine, Saint Alban Berg Valentine's Day Massacre, It wouldn't be Valentine's Day without Alban Berg Valentine, Stay, little Alban Berg Valentine, stay.

Nono 100

Ukrainian composers

Post-Apocalypse Now. The New Yorker, Feb. 5, 2024.

Blinking red

Ann Kjellberg, at Book Post, surveys the catastrophic state of journalism. The worst is undoubtedly still to come.

A figgis-vizueta moment

For Peter Schickele

In 1980, when I was twelve, I went to see PDQ Bach, aka Peter Schickele, at Wolf Trap, outside Washington DC. Having already become a PDQ enthusiast, I brought along my family's shoebox-sized cassette-tape recorder, not realizing that recording concerts was illegal. As it turned out, the tape I made was useless, because all you could hear was my shrieking, cackling laughter. I doubt I've laughed so hard at anything since. The magnificent Schickele, the most recent of an immortal succession of musical humorists that includes Gerard Hoffnung, Anna Russell, and Victor Borge, died on January 16 at the age of eighty-eight. Margalit Fox wrote a wonderfully thorough and affectionate obituary for the New York Times; Allan Kozinn did the master mangler justice in the Washington Post. Brin Solomon, at VAN, thoughtfully ponders Schickele's musical gifts. There's a great deal of Schickeliana online, including many delightful versions of Last Tango in Bayreuth; see especially the Breaking Winds and the University of Michigan Bassoon Studio. Above, one of Schickele's so-called "serious" works — although the key to his appeal was that he was never completely serious and never completely silly. He was, as I wrote back in 2015, "the one American composer whose name makes everyone smile."

For Phill Niblock

The great experimental composer died on January 8, at the age of ninety. Above, mattie barbier plays Niblock's A Trombone Piece at TreePeople, Los Angeles, as part of Wild Up's Darkness Sounding festival.