Apex 2017

At the New Yorker website may be found my list of Notable Performances and Recordings of 2017.

The Rest Is Noise Person of the Year is Tyshawn Sorey. Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and listen to it.

My favorite music book of 2017 was Tim Rutherford-Johnson's Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (University of California Press). This remarkable feat of synthesis and analysis, about which I'll write in The New Yorker in the near future, has fundamentally changed my vision of the music of our time. No one who seriously follows contemporary music should be without it.

Other notable books on music: Harvey Sachs, Toscanini: Musician of Conscience (Liveright); Damon Krukowski, The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World (The New Press); Severine Neff, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, eds., "The Rite of Spring" at 100 (Indiana UP); Alice Goodman, History Is Our Mother: Three Libretti (New York Review); Kyle Gann, Charles Ives's Concord: Essays after a Sonata (Illinois UP); Bill Alves and Brett Campbell, Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick (Indiana UP); Seth Brodsky, From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (University of California Press); Bethany Beardslee and Minna Proctor, I Sang the Unsingable: My Life in Twentieth-Century Music (Boydell and Brewer); Celia Applegate, The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme (University of Toronto Press); Annegret Fauser, Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring (Oxford).