Arts

Music

‘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

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

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

Matthew Rivera

Frankie Newton: Lost and Found

A trove of newly discovered newspaper articles written by the trumpeter shines fresh light on his enigmatic life.

March 19, 2025

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

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

Sam Huber

Circles ’Neath Your Eyes

The men and women in Lucinda Williams’s songs struggle to turn their injuries into something they can live with.

July 11, 2024

The Music of Woodstock

Greil Marcus

The Brotherhood of Rock

“The Band had made, Robertson says, a brotherhood, and in the way that in the songs each man’s contribution shaded and jumped into every other’s, they acted out an ideal of democracy and equality.”

March 23, 2017 issue

Stephen Stills performing on the Dutch television program Toppop, 1972

Lorrie Moore

Ain’t It Always Stephen Stills

For a particular generation, the songs of Stephen Stills were marinated into our minds, our spines, our bones.

August 17, 2017 issue

Adam Shatz

The Beautiful Sounds of Jimi Hendrix

“Hendrix used a range of technological innovations (feedback, sustain, effects pedals) to expand the sound of the guitar, to make it ‘talk’ in ways that it never had.”

January 9, 2014 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Rock of Ages

“Music was scarcely the point by now: this was literature, theater, religion, noise opera, political action, erotic paradise.”

December 16, 1999 issue

The Latest

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

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

Philip Clark

All the Stops

The harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has spent much of his career in the crossfire between traditionalism and new directions.

April 13, 2025

Nicolas Collins

An Open Call for Invention

A veteran composer of electronic music recalls his college introduction to John Cage and the composers who came after.

February 12, 2025

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Sheer Love of the Music

Under the direction of Amelia Freedman, for sixty years the Nash Ensemble has both venerated chamber music’s history and embraced the shock of the new.

December 28, 2024

Jenny Uglow

Hallelujah!

In his book Every Valley, Charles King explains the enduring appeal of Handel’s Messiah since its premiere in Dublin nearly three hundred years ago.

December 19, 2024 issue

Sam Huber

‘The Loudest, Brightest Thing’

The producer and DJ Sophie created a musical language with which to explore feelings too inchoate—too big, too raw—to be spoken.

November 24, 2024

J. Hoberman

The Beatles Effect

A new documentary treats the Fab Four’s Shea Stadium concert as a window into the dreams and nightmares of the summer of 1965.

October 12, 2024

Walker Mimms

Ted Lives!

The poet and visual artist Ted Joans found a kind of mystical power in jazz and surrealism alike.

October 2, 2024

Peter E. Gordon

Music and Memory

After the Holocaust, classical composers explored music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty.

October 17, 2024 issue