Alex Ross's Blog, page 87

A Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson moment

Lou Harrison at 100

To Lou, with Love. The New Yorker, April 24, 2017.

The Shift Festival in DC

Rite of Spring. The New Yorker, April 17, 2017.

Bookshelf

New and recent publications of interest.

Damon Krukowski, The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World (The New Press)

Pamela M. Potter, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (University of California Press)

Justin Davidson, Magnetic City: A Walking Companion to New York (Spiegel & Grau)

Christian Wolff, Occasional Pieces: Writings and Interviews, 1952-2013 (Oxford)

Jonathan Lethem, More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers, ed. Christopher Boucher (Melville House)

Joan Didion, South and West (Knopf)

David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon (Doubleday)

Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply (Random House)

Miscellany: Bob Hurwitz, Tony Conrad, etc.

Robert Hurwitz, the longtime head of Nonesuch Records, one of the keenest listeners in the recent history of American music, is celebrated with a concert at BAM on April 1. Bob is an avid amateur pianist, and the concert will feature music written for him by a fairly imposing lineup of composers: John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Timo Andres, Louis Andriessen, Donnacha Dennehy, Philip Glass, Adam Guettel, Brad Mehldau, Pat Metheny, Nico Muhly, Randy Newman, and Steve Reich. There will also be performances by Kronos Quartet, k.d. lang, Stephin Merritt, Dawn Upshaw, and Caetano Veloso, among others.... One of my favorite programming initiatives of recent years was Spring for Music at Carnegie Hall. The concept of that festival — orchestras from across North America, chosen on the basis of creative programming — is finding new life as SHIFT, a collaboration between the Kennedy Center and Washington Performing Arts. The first edition begins next week with performances by the Boulder Philharmonic, the North Carolina Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, and the Knights.... In town for SHIFT, I will talk to Will Robin at the University of Maryland on March 28.... Will has an excellent New York Times piece on the late Tony Conrad, who will be celebrated in a series of events and concerts in April. Tyler Hubby's documentary Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present is as riveting as Will says, and Corey Arcangel's archival site Music and the Mind of the World is worth hours, if not days, of your time.... Amy Beth Kirsten's Quixote is playing at Peak Performances in Montclair, NJ.... The Lou Harrison centennial is approaching, and Sarah Cahill is touring with a Lou program, touching both coasts.... #HearAllComposers is an Ireland-focused campaign for gender equality in programming. Lisa Hirsch and Brian Lauritzen have been compiling stats on American 2017-18 season announcements: they are pretty dismal to see. More on this soon.

The future of the LA Phil

A Cultural Comment for the New Yorker website.

Nightafternight playlist

— Linda Catlin Smith, Drifter and other works; Apartment House, Bozzini Quartet (another timbre)

— Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Hommage à Daniel Libeskind; Ensemble SurPlus (Neos)

— Thomas Adès, Asyla, Tevot, Polaris, Brahms; Adès conducting the London Symphony, with Samuel Dale Johnson, baritone (LSO Live)

— Sibelius, Kullervo, Kortekangas, Migrations; Osmo Vänskä conducting the Minnesota Orchestra and YL Male Voice CHoir, with Lilli Paasikivi and Tommi Hakala (BIS)

— Recurrence: Thurídur Jónsdóttir, Flow and Fusion, María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, Aequora, Daníel Bjarnason, Emergence, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Dreaming, Hlynur A. Vilmarsson, bd; Bjarnason conducting the Iceland Symphony (Sono Luminus)

— George Lewis, The Will to Adorn, Shadowgraph 5, Artificial Life 2007, Born Obbligato, In Memoriam Albert Lee Murray; ICE (New Focus)

— Schubert, Fantasia in F Minor and other four-hand piano works; Andreas Staier, Alexander Melnikov (Harmonia Mundi)

— Bach, St. Matthew Passion; John Eliot Gardiner leading the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, with James Gilchrist, Stephan Loges (SDG)

A Missy Mazzoli moment

Mazzoli's Death Valley Junction, which can also be heard on a New Amsterdam recording by the Jasper Quartet, was written in honor of the remarkable Marta Becket, the diva of Death Valley, who died in January at the age of ninety-two.

In praise of Ann Goldstein

Today is a heartbreaking day at The New Yorker. Ann Goldstein, the head of our copy-editing department, is leaving the magazine after a quietly glorious forty-three-year career. Copy editing — two words — may sound to outsiders like a job of lesser significance, but it is, in fact, fairly monumental. The New Yorker has an idiosyncratic and byzantine array of house rules concerning style; I wrote some years back about the disconcerting experience of being edited by the legendary Eleanor Gould Packard. Ann has long been the supreme custodian of the sense of a New Yorker voice, and she has a way of applying those rules without disrupting the flow of a writer's thought. Indeed, being herself a writer and translator of great skill, she invariably makes the prose more elegant. It is as if a slightly blurry image were snapping into perfect focus. I learned as much about writing from Ann as from any teacher in school. (She would surely have improved that sentence.) The loss is made heavier by the recent departure of the no less beloved Mary Norris, another copy-editing mainstay. Not long ago, Mary embarked on a new career as an author, with her book Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. Ann, too, has lately moved into the limelight, with her acclaimed translations of Primo Levi and Elena Ferrante, among others. We New Yorker writers are tremendously happy for them, and yet it is difficult to say farewell to editors of such brilliance, not least because they make us all look better, one clarifying comma at a time. My own gratitude is limitless. "Almost limitless?" Ann might suggest, fearing imprecision. No, limitless.

Criticism in crisis

A Cultural Comment for the New Yorker website.