This week’s The American Purpose carries another of my essays on the erasure of the arts from the American experience – how it happened...

“I can recall walking eastward on the Chicago Midway on a summer evening. . . . Under [the elms] drivers had pulled over, parking bumper...

The current American Scholar includes my 8,000-word essay on the impact of the pandemic on the arts in the US. It seems to me a terribly...

In 1944, Bernard Herrmann collaborated with the producer Norman Corwin on “Whitman,” a half-hour dramatic presentation invoking America’s...

“I know there has been a lot of discussion about how we can make a difference by programing one African-American composition per...

In this weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” I review Alex Ross’s important new book “Wagnerism.” I write in part: Great works of art are so...

Conrad L. Osborne, whose incisive critical scalpel cuts through present-day distractions and obfuscations with magnificent precision, has...

Advocating a more “civilized” United States – and simultaneously fighting a cultural Cold War — John F. Kennedy implausibly proclaimed...

In his most important speech about the place of culture in the national experience, delivered at Amherst College mere weeks before his...

In 1987, my Understanding Toscanini was the most discussed, most reviled book about classical music to have appeared in recent memory....

Lawrence Tibbett sings Porgy (1935) Though a prominent British reviewer of what became the hit Met production of Porgy and Bess called...

FDR’s New Deal included the Works Progress Administration, which generously supported the arts in unprecedented ways. Employing writers,...

“It’s interesting that Gershwin chose as his protagonist a person who’s on his knees. ‘Taking a knee’ has never been more relevant.”...

Paul Rosenfeld, whose writings on American modernist composers were once regarded as insightful and prophetic, detected in George...

One of the most controversial acts in the ever controversial life of Dmitri Shostakovich was his tortured decision in 1960 to join the...

Between 1942 and 1945, the three pre-eminent Russian composers wrote music responding to World War II. These responses differ in...

“People underestimate Stalin’s level of control,” says Solomon Volkov. “I once started to calculate how many people in the arts Stalin...

Back in the 1930s, American radio – that is, American commercial radio, which is all we had – knew that listeners were amenable to paying...

Wilhelm Furtwangler Dmitri Shostakovich Arturo Toscanini A new podcast, produced by The American Interest (TAI), translates my article on...

The healing properties of music is suddenly an inescapable topic. Serendipitously, the last concert given by PostClassical Ensemble...