Arts

Music

Satie’s Spell

Erik Satie took down the arrogance of late Romantic classical music, gently but ruthlessly taking up its vocabulary and removing all the excess, including authorship.

January 15, 2026 issue

Andrew O’Hagan

The Soundtrack of a Generation

The Oasis reunion tour was a series of football stadium nostalgia-fests, with the fans the unmistakable stars of the show.

December 18, 2025 issue

Philip Clark

The Dude Ranch Above the Sea

Steely Dan conjured a sealed-in-amber studio perfection—a sound that could alienate listeners as easily as seduce them.

November 29, 2025

Geoffrey O’Brien

The Escape Artists

Mason Bates’s operatic adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay condenses the encyclopedic novel into a story about two outsiders caught between the harsh reality of World War II and their success as creators of a comic book superhero.

November 6, 2025 issue

Adam Shatz

‘Like a Hymn’

The jazz pianist Amina Claudine Myers has spent her career weaving jazz, blues, gospel, and classical music into a distinctively personal idiom.

August 16, 2025

Philip Clark

The Atonal Genie

Arnold Schoenberg’s music still challenges listeners, but his twelve-tone technique turns up in all sorts of unexpected places, from horror film scores to cartoons to jazz.

June 12, 2025 issue

Adam Shatz

‘Where Should the Birds Fly?’

The new record by the Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem reflects the fury, sorrow, and grief that the war on Gaza provoked in him.

March 27, 2025

Nathan Shields

Liberalism’s Pianist

Can Igor Levit restore classical music’s claim to cultural and political authority, or is it irrevocably lost?

February 12, 2026 issue

Practice Makes Perfect

Charles Rosen

On Playing the Piano

“For all of us, music is bodily gesture as well as sound, and its primitive connection with dance is never entirely distilled away.”

October 21, 1999 issue

Alfred Brendel

On Playing Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto

“Who wants a sound to traverse his nose, or to stop in front of him? And would this really be music, or an experiment in physics?”

February 16, 1995 issue

Simon Callow

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pianist

Jeremy Denk’s memoir is not just about piano lessons but about life lessons—how the artist creates a self.

April 21, 2022 issue

Dmitri Shostakovich with Anatoly Alexandrov, the author’s grandfather, Novorossiysk, Russia, 1961

Anastasia Edel

Shostakovich and the Chimes of Novorossiysk

Like Shostakovich’s native Leningrad, Novorossiysk had suffered terribly during World War II. As the news of the war memorial’s musical innovation spread through the city, more people came and stayed for hours. My grandfather’s voice must have grown hoarse as he recited the story of the Chimes’ creation.

April 8, 2019

The Latest

David Beal

The Docteur Is In

The Congolese rumba pioneer Docteur Nico helped define the sound of African decolonization—and became one of the great visionaries of the electric guitar.

March 11, 2026

Marina Harss

Alexei Ratmansky’s Leap of Faith

Having wrested himself from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, the great choreographer has sought to remake himself and his work in Denmark.

March 12, 2026 issue

Anika Banister

Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams

For six decades, Yoko Ono’s art has considered how we should live with ourselves and one another in an unknowable, painful world.

January 25, 2026

Christopher Benfey

Anni’s Orchestra

The late prints of Anni Albers bear out her conviction that artists need to “listen” to their materials, be “tuned” to them.

November 12, 2025

Adam Shatz

The Spiritual Jazz of Alice Coltrane

Alice Coltrane reinvented her adoptive Hinduism by interweaving it with the music of the Black church.

November 20, 2025 issue

Poorna Swami

Our Nusrat

The Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan earned fans the world over. For decades they have debated just what he stood for.

June 16, 2025

Larry Wolff

Those Who Live in the Dark

A recent production of The Threepenny Opera recovered the work’s emphasis on subversive anarchism and destructive sexuality.

May 10, 2025

Joseph Horowitz

Grand Opera’s Tribulations

This season’s production of Aida at the Met sheds light on issues facing both the company and the genre of grand opera itself.

May 29, 2025 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Eddying Toward Doom

Any adaptation of Moby-Dick must pick and choose from the novel’s many themes and tones; Jake Heggie’s opera tends toward a frequency attuned to sorrow.

May 15, 2025 issue