Apex 2021

At the New Yorker website may be found my list of Notable Performances and Recordings of 2021.

Some notable music books of 2021: Kira Thurman's Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (Cornell UP), William Robin's Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace (Oxford UP), Paul Griffiths's Mr. Beethoven (New York Review Books), Daphne A. Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP), Kelefa Sanneh's Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres (Penguin), Joseph L. Clarke's Echo's Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space (University of Pittsburgh Press), Micaela Baranello's The Operetta Empire: Music Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna (University of California Press), Matthew Aucoin's The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera (FSG), Humphrey Burton's In My Own Time: An Autobiography (Boydell), and Emily Zazulia's Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing (Oxford UP).

Outside of music, I read with great enjoyment Patrick Keefe's Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Liz Brown's Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire, Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, Elizabeth Kolbert's Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles, Mark Harris's Mike Nichols: A Life, Herfried Münkler's Marx, Wagner Nietzsche: Welt im Umbruch, Melissa Homestead's The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, and George Prochnik's Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution.