I love the vast surface of silence; and it is my chief delight to break it.
Carl Nielsen
What a difference a year makes! This time last spring, the existential dread was starting to sink in as we hunkered down for the initial surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, several vaccines are being administered by the hundreds of thousands each day, businesses and schools are beginning to reopen, and there’s a general tone […]
The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-nominated tome, remains one of the most impressive and convincing books on twentieth-century music. I recently finished reading through it a second time (the first was during my undergrad) and instantly fell in love with it all over again. Using cultural history, biography, style history, and analysis […]
This is the fourth and final installment of my multiple-part series. You can read the previous parts here, here, and here. On December 20, 1973, Aaron Copland made a guest appearance on the public television series Day at Night. Within this wide-ranging and lively discussion, one particularly fascinating exchange occurs when the interviewer, James Day, inquires about Copland’s contemporary musical language: James Day: […]
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