Category Archives: Listening

Listening to a last and a first

I have been listening for weeks to a very challenging new piece, the trumpet concerto HUSH (2023) by Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023). With its intricate tissues and textures, densities and dissolutions, the piece demands great concentration from the listener to unfold … Continue reading

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Listening that lates

I find this performance highly intriguing.  The piece is a piano transcription (1998) by Paul Barnes of Gandhi’s Sanskrit “Evening Song” that closes Act III of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha (1979).  While the operatic original creates a hypnotic suspension of time … Continue reading

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How Schubert listened to the brook’s lullaby

Franz Schubert’s lieder do not sound like poems set to music.  They sound like actualizations of musical settings.  It is as if the composer cast in notation the inner musicality of these pieces which, to his mind, were already written … Continue reading

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Piano paraphrase

What is a piano paraphrase?  Part of its seductive fluidity is that it is not a transcription (faithful rewriting), an arrangement, a piano reduction, a fantasy, a souvenir, or reminiscences yet it may contain elements of all of them. Furthermore, … Continue reading

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Participatory listening

I call “participatory” the creative listening where we are invited to contribute actively to our musical experience as opposed to sit back and absorb it.  In participatory listening we are expected to play an energetic role in the creation of … Continue reading

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What is canonical about classical music?

In a recent column entitled “Questioning the Canon,” Simon Woods, President and CEO, League of American Orchestras, argued that, in their effort for “greater inclusion,” orchestras should abandon the notion of a “classical music canon” and embrace the idea of … Continue reading

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Why we no longer engage with popular music

During the second half of the twentieth century popular music functioned as a major public domain which gathered young people in a cultural field of intensity – a realm of collective excitement and passionate engagement.  Music as social life offered … Continue reading

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Piano music at sunset/Im Abendrot

Pantelis loves walks but does not like to go out at sunsets because they slide into something indeterminate that makes him feel insecure.  Sunsets may lead to bliss or annihilation, or both. In lieder, sunsets come at the end of … Continue reading

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Taking favorite solo sections out of their piano concertos

Listening to the opening movement of the Brahms 1st piano concerto I am reminded of the great number of splendid solo passages that can be found in concertos of this kind.  Such passages may be the opening of the piece, … Continue reading

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On lateness in listening: From late style to late mood

The scholarly symposium “Late Style and the Idea of the Summative Work in Bach and Beethoven,” taking place this month at the Department of Music & Dance in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, inspired me to return to a particular aspect … Continue reading

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