On November 22, Gunther Schuller would have been 100 years old. It was my pleasure to contribute an encomium to the new Gunther Schuller Festschrift: I am privileged to have known three sui generis American musicians of Gunther Schuller’s generation. All three both composed and performed. It was always my opinion, my frustration, that they were not sufficiently esteemed and … [Read more...] about Happy Hundredth Birthday to Gunther Schuller (1925-2015)
Maurice Ravel, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, and the Vanishing Authority of French Pianism
In Western classical music, the iconic composers disappeared sometime midway through the twentieth century, with Dmitri Shostakovich the final contributor to the symphonic canon. Such things happen. But a plethora of inspired interpreters – conductors, singers, instrumentalists – played and sang on, sustaining the lineage of composers Russian, German, Italian, and French. When … [Read more...] about Maurice Ravel, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, and the Vanishing Authority of French Pianism
“Parsifal” Then and Now — A DEI Blitz
So protean are the operas of Richard Wagner that they mirror not merely their own time and place – Germany of the Romantic era – but their time and place of performance. In Hitler’s Germany, they embodied creeds of national and racial supremacy. In fin-de-siecle America, they excited melioristic fervor. During this trans-Atlantic heyday of Wagnerism, peaking in the 1880s and … [Read more...] about “Parsifal” Then and Now — A DEI Blitz
“Cheapening Freedom by Over-Praising It”
The journal H-Diplo Review, addressing scholars of diplomacy, foreign relations, and international history, has graciously published a little something I was invited to write about my 2023 book “The Propaganda of Freedom” in an attempt to foster cross-disciplinary inquiry: As a cultural historian specializing in the history of American music, I have long been aware of … [Read more...] about “Cheapening Freedom by Over-Praising It”
Yunchan Lim and the Scent of Nostalgia
I am old enough to remember a time when famous pianists were great pianists. It is a topic I rehearse with pianists of my acquaintance who like myself began attending recitals in the 1960s. So we heard Argerich, Arrau, Cliburn, Curzon, Gilels, Horowitz, Moravec, Serkin, Richter, Rubinstein. Some of us (not me) were lucky to hear Kempff and Michelangeli, who were not regular … [Read more...] about Yunchan Lim and the Scent of Nostalgia