As readers of this blog know, I was recently amazed to find myself talking on the radio for 20 minutes about my new book “Moral Fire” in...

As I have occasion to remark in my new book Moral Fire, moral passion is a phenomenon little glimpsed in public life nowadays, unless you...

My new book Moral Fire is praised in today’s Boston Globe by Jeremy Eichler for its “elegant and warmly sympathetic” portrait of Henry...

Now that the always enterprising Anne Midgette has posted my blog objecting to live Bach cello suites imposed on visitors to the Corcoran...

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE CORCORAN GALLERY Dear Mr. Bollerer: As someone who writes frequently about the Gilded Age, I’ve...

Cross-disciplinary education is in fashion right now, but I have the impression it’s more honored in the breach than the observance, at...

I was recently entrusted with delivering the graduation address for the School of Music at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana....

I have a new book, just published: Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle. Here’s a sampling: “If the Met’s screaming...

I review the San Francisco Symphony’s remarkable “American Mavericks” festival in the current Times Literary Supplement (UK) as follows:...

For a variety of reasons, raw spontaneity is less common at symphonic performances nowadays than in the nineteenth century and before. In...

The recent “Orchestral Summit” at the University of Michigan was a labor of love on the part of Mark Clague of the university’s...

“Music Unwound,” the $300,000 NEH initiative funding a consortium of adventurous orchestras, has two basic components. The first is...

Readers of this blog will be aware of an ongoing state of war with my son, Bernie, whose adoration of Vladimir Horowitz I do not share....

Having just spent a week taking part in a “Dvorak and America” festival presented by the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra, I think I’ve...

The current Times Literary Supplement (UK) publishes my review of Broadway’s new Porgy and Bess — informed by a book I’m writing (for W....

The two best-known scores by Manuel de Falla – El Amor Brujo and The Three-Cornered Hat – began as stage works. Today, however, we know...

The current Times Literary Supplement (UK) includes my review of Fabio Luisi conducting SIegfried and Don Giovanni at the Met, as...

The most vivid writings about composers’ lives, I find, are the ones they produce themselves: letters, articles, books. A case in point...

The central premise of Post-Classical Ensemble’s three-day “Ives Project” at the Strathmore Music Center last week was that Charles Ives...

The American Repertory Theatre’s new Porgy and Bess, with its claims that Gershwin’s is a crippled opera that needs fixing, is...