Dale Cockrell’s “Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in in New York 1840-1917” is a book that will bring to wider attention the...

How did Aaron Copland’s film music attempt to counteract the Hollywood influence of Erich Korngold? To what degree did he draw...

Preparing an August 15 Busoni/Schoenberg/Kandinsky program for The Phillips Collection in DC, I discovered myself newly entranced by one...

Faced with a twelve-hour drive, with wife and dog, from Manhattan to the idyllic Brevard (North Carolina) Music Festival, I threw some...

Who was the American Bartok? The most plausible candidate, I would say, is Arthur Farwell (1872-1952), who led the “Indianists” movement...

It’s said that Walt Whitman has been set to music more than any other poet save Shakespeare. Oddly, the most memorable of these settings...

However popular it may be, Porgy and Bess remains an object of rampant controversy and confusion. An odd item in the New York Times the...

Claude Debussy wrote: “But my poor friend! Do you remember the Javanese music, able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable...

In the current issue the quarterly review Raritan, I write that Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Charles Ives’s Symphony...

Did Wagner exploit King Ludwig? In Luchino Visconti’s magnificent four-hour film Ludwig, the king is ingeniously cast as an embodiment of...

Could Harry Burleigh — Antonin Dvorak’s African-American assistant — be considered an Uncle Tom? These days, the question comes up...

Eight years ago, on the occasion of PostClassical Ensemble’s first performance of Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto with Benjamin Pasternack...

According to my friend the remarkably loquacious Spanish pianist Pedro Carboné, the “birth of Spanish music” occurs during the third of...

The current Weekly Standard has a long piece by me about the future of American orchestras. I write that orchestras can help us to heal...

Beginning in the 1860s, the conductor Theodore Thomas – a symphonic Johnny Appleseed – began touring the entire United States with his...

My father, who grew up on the Lower East Side, probably never heard opera until – like other Jews of his generation facing American...

As I write in Understanding Toscanini (1987): “In 1932, in a minor cause celebre, Wilhelm Furtwangler was discovered likening American...

As many who follow baseball know, Jacob deGrom is an artist. It’s not just that he’s likely to win the National League Cy Young Award. Or...

Charles O’Connell, who commanded “artists and repertoire” for RCA Victor from 1930 to 1944, left a book of reminiscences – The Other Side...

Today’s “Wall Street Journal” includes my review of “one of the most searing listening experiences in the history of recorded sound” —...