Monthly Archives: December 2014

“So if you want to listen, it is not enough only to hear.  You must first find your melancholy.  And music is the best of all possible means to do this. … Listening is a practice, not merely an activity.  … Continue reading →

The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy opens his book Listening/À l’écoute (2002) with two questions:  “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable? … Isn’t the philosopher someone who always hears/entend (and who hears everything), but who cannot listen, or who, … Continue reading →

One of the many ways in which Pantelis Polychronidis is making music is by verbalizing female beauty. He and I sit in at a café, a beach, a concert hall, a park, and he notices a woman and starts telling … Continue reading →

In 1830 Berlioz wrote a five-movement program work called An Episode in the Life of an Artist, in Five Parts: Symphonie Fantastique. The protagonist of the episode is a “young musician of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination” (Cone, Hector … Continue reading →

One of the towering friendships of the 20h century was the artistic and intellectual interaction between the indeterminacy composer Morton Feldman (1926-87) and the abstract caricaturist Philip Guston (1913-88).  They met in 1950 in Carnegie Hall, where they had gone … Continue reading →

The original score of Mozart’s “Coronation” Concerto (1788) leaves out large parts of the left hand of the piano part. Composer and pianist Timothy Andres (b. 1985) completes it in ways that are alternatively dissonant, dissolving, and dreamy. The cadenza … Continue reading →

Since the 1920s the narrative of the Greek popular song tells one major story: There is a dejected guy (“Το πικραμένο αγόρι”) who cannot have the girl he loves because of his possessive mother (“Μπεζέρισα”) and there is a friend … Continue reading →

Mick and Mary incite each other into a crescendo of Dionysian frenzy. Watching them in full screen you forget what the song says and you relish what it does. Jagger has a tremendous left hand that fits with the Pan spirit he embodies.  When performing … Continue reading →

Nietzsche derived the subtitle of his Ecce Homo (1988) from Pindar’s line “Γένοιο οἷος ἐσσὶ µαθών” (Pythian Ode II, 73), which Alexander Nehamas has rendered “Having learned, become who you are” (Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 1985). Michel Foucault reflected on … Continue reading →