News
Entertainment
Science & Technology
Life
Culture & Art
Hobbies
News
Entertainment
Science & Technology
Culture & Art
Hobbies
Gap Trap Laugh, Part II • VAN Magazine
PART II VI.Shimmering Ontology / (Laugh) Struck by the apparition, she burst out laughing. The laughter of childbirth.—Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils To continue reading, subscribe now. Subscribe from $4.99/month! Unlimited access to ourweekly issues and archives. Already have an account? Login here
The Rhizome • VAN Magazine
Every piece of music has a political context, including the person or institution commissioning the work, the space in which the music is performed, the funding mechanisms and the audience’s social background. In the 20th century, complex contemporary music was generally associated with democracy, because it represented a form of individual expression that was unacceptable […]
“To Be a Musician Is to Desire a Piece of Music” • VAN Magazine
Last week at the Philharmonie in Berlin, the ensemble Pygmalion under conductor Raphaël Pichon performed a concert of sacred music from during and after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). It was a brutally destructive conflict that by some estimates decimated the German population by half. And though religious tensions were among the causes for the […]
The Unconscious Process • VAN Magazine
On a recent warm autumn evening in Porto, the Russian-Armenian pianist Eva Gevorgyan performed before a crowd so spasmodic with coughing fits it may yet prove to be a locus of the next pandemic. The barking did nothing to quell Gevorgyan’s performance of Chopin, Brahms, and Schumann. Dressed in a Celedon-green sequined dress, a silken […]
A Piece for Peace • VAN Magazine
In 1965, the United Nations asked Benjamin Britten to compose a choral work to celebrate the organization’s 20th anniversary. The piece, it hoped, would be “the natural and inevitable sequel to the War Requiem.” The Secretary-General, U Thant, explained that the new work would be premiered at the UN Day concert on October 24, 1965, […]
Playing Along • VAN Magazine
American classical music institutions have been quiet lately. Quieter than they were about the murder of George Floyd. Much quieter than they were about the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Individual musicians have often been more outspoken. But in recent years institutions have taken political positions often enough that their current silence is surprising. To […]
The Disappearing Monument • VAN Magazine
It is easy to believe in the permanence of sound. Now every recording can be streamed and repeated on demand without degradation; files replicate flawlessly; loops repeat without wear; digital archives expand infinitely. Music appears inexhaustible as technology promises security against erosion—like nothing goes away. William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops,” receiving a deluxe reissue in […]
A House of Mud and Hope • VAN Magazine
The rain poured through the mud-brick walls of her father’s house in Nyaweng county, Jonglei State of South Sudan, soaking the earthen floor where Nyibol Thon held her newborn daughter. As water dripped from the thatched roof onto her makeshift bed, she began to sing. To continue reading, subscribe now. Subscribe from $4.99/month! Unlimited access […]
Thin Fire • VAN Magazine
Not long ago, I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. One line stayed with me: “Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—‘Chloe liked Olivia. . .’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes […]
The Question Mark in the System • VAN Magazine
I’ve known Georg Friedrich Haas for many years, first as a teacher and later as a friend and mentor, and his music has been a constant source of inspiration. Ahead of the North American premiere of his monumental “11,000 Strings" for 50 microtonally attuned pianos and chamber orchestra performed by Klangforum Wien at the Park […]
Crossing the Line • VAN Magazine
On September 11, the Israeli conductor Ilan Volkov gave an emotional speech following a concert with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall in London, decrying the carnage inflicted on Gaza and the West Bank by the Israeli government under Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces. “I know that many of us feel […]
A Stale Start • VAN Magazine
Since last week, the conclusion has come to seem inescapable: By sticking with its new chief conductor François-Xavier Roth despite allegations of sexual harassment surfacing against him last year, the SWR Symphonieorchester—the renowned Stuttgart-based radio orchestra with a particularly strong contemporary-music reputation—has lost its way. Cancelling his contract following the allegations might well have led […]
Two Siegmunds, Two Wälses • VAN Magazine
After writing 9,000 words on the “Ring” cycle, I thought that maybe I’d finally be done thinking about it. For a while, I was. Then, after what would be a two-month break in my obsession, I decided to return to something I wanted to write about at the time but never got to. During the […]
Unwind, Unwound • VAN Magazine
Taken to orchestral concerts as a child, I was restless. The complexity and vast architectures of a typical Romantic symphony made me think of the music as some fractal maze, wholly illegible in its ever-shifting textures and bombastic pronouncements of brass-laden grandeur. It felt like sound and fury signifying nothing. To continue reading, subscribe now. […]
Selective Empathy • VAN Magazine
When it comes to the Middle East, people regress into totalitarian positions and tribal logics with sobering speed. Where do you stand? Are you “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine”? Do you say “genocide,” or don’t you? To continue reading, subscribe now. Subscribe from $4.99/month! Unlimited access to ourweekly issues and archives. Already have an account? Login here
The Transcriber • VAN Magazine
Donde menos se piensa, salta la liebre—where you least expect it, the hare leaps. Sancho Panza’s proverb from the Second Part of Don Quijote conveys the suddenness with which insight can arrive. The hare leapt for me while reading Lydia Davis's essay “Demanding Pleasures: On the Art of Observation” in Harper's. Responding to the perennial […]
Fluid and Amorphous • VAN Magazine
A new autumn brings with it a new season from Vache Baroque, les nouveaux enfants terribles of Baroque opera. This year’s offering is André Campra’s 1699 opera-ballet “Le Carnaval de Venise,” which received its UK premiere 326 years overdue. Directed by James Hurley and conducted from the harpsichord by Vache’s cofounder Jonathan Darbourne, this production, […]
The Paternal Presence • VAN Magazine
The last time I saw Christoph von Dohnányi was at a lovely dinner at his apartment in Munich this last June. We were celebrating a positive health report his wife Barbara had just received and the mood was easy, relaxed, and convivial. The conversation with CvD covered enormous ground, as it always did—he spoke with […]
The Other Wage Gap • VAN Magazine
It is a truth universally if quietly acknowledged that a singer in possession of work will be paid less than the orchestral instrumentalists with whom they perform. To continue reading, subscribe now. Subscribe from $4.99/month! Unlimited access to ourweekly issues and archives. Already have an account? Login here
Low Note • VAN Magazine
In a video on the social media page High Note, an account launched on July 29 featuring “street interviews with classical music icons,” the tenor Freddie De Tommaso stands outside a pub drinking a Guinness, joking with a female interviewer about whether his favorite composer is Verdi, Puccini, or Sean Paul. In about 40 seconds, […]
A Life Told in Gestures • VAN Magazine
It is rare for there to be new developments in “Ring” cycle staging without dipping into the trashy, cynical, or ironic; in other words, without making the saga’s characters worse than they already are. The trend over the last ten years has been to embrace rather than ameliorate the weaknesses in Wagner’s text and, by […]
Machine in the Gods • VAN Magazine
When Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus opened in Bayreuth in 1876, it boasted the latest in theater technology. From its covered orchestra pit to its state-of-the-art lighting and stage machinery, the theater’s technical innovations were meant to mirror the composer’s experimentations with harmony, structure, and form. The Bayreuth Festival was inaugurated with the first complete performance of […]
They Toll For Thee • VAN Magazine
Bells call people to pray, to mourn, to marry. They pass them news of war, peace, fire, and flood. On a sweltering August afternoon in London, they summoned me to the Royal Albert Hall. That night’s performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 from The Hallé at the BBC Proms was partly special because it was […]
Situations for Distracted Listening • VAN Magazine
Every time cultural organizers huddle to pick a festival theme, their brainstorming heat surely counts as a modest contribution to global warming. In today’s attention economy—where information is overabundant and rage-bait has surpassed click-bait like an evolved Pokémon—art institutions are forced to perform the same precarious dance, navigating survival and relevance under the increasingly standardized […]
The politics and beauty of "Appalachian Spring" • VAN Magazine
With Trump’s tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue and combat-fatigued foot soldiers guarding masked ICE agents in Los Angeles, who’s listening to “Appalachian Spring”? How does Aaron Copland’s World War II-era patriotic evocation of the American pastoral strike our ears in an era of xenophobic, gun-toting vigilantism, when small towns are propagandized as the last stand […]
The roots of orchestral music in Turkey • VAN Magazine
Lighting up mid-conversation, Murat Erginol sat at a coffee shop in the breezy, open-air halls of Atatürk Culture Center, Istanbul’s premier performing arts complex. Erginol, wispily bearded and quick to smile, is, among other accolades, first violinist of the Gedik Philharmonic Orchestra, one of Turkey’s many privately sponsored ensembles. Then rehearsing “The Four Seasons” by […]
The Depths of Darkness • VAN Magazine
“When I finish a cycle with Broadway tunes, or what I would call The Pops, there’s a release of energy. But, for the meat and potatoes of those concerts, I’m on my own. Of course, I’m not being told what to do, so it’s hard to think, well, how did that go over?” The rich, […]
A Covert Holiday • VAN Magazine
The recent release of political prisoners in Belarus became possible thanks to the consistent and targeted efforts of the United States. These efforts began a year ago under the Biden administration and yielded their first results in February 2025 with the release of both U.S. and Belarusian citizens. That month also marked the first time […]
What is the Work / What is the World • VAN Magazine
There is something strange in the ancient woodlands of Jeløya island. Were it not for the little orange sign staked into the ground, you might almost not notice it, so subtle is “The Grey Zone (NeverWhere),” an installation by Jacob Kirkegaard for this year’s edition of the Momentum Biennale in Norway. The loudspeakers are carefully […]
Confluence • VAN Magazine
“Into the Night,” a new work for sitar, Indian classical ensemble and orchestra by sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun, begins with a nocturnal luminescence. Warm shimmering string tremolos give a harmonic foundation, over which a sitar melody blooms with bright, undulating streams of notes. These solo melodies become energetic dialogues. The esraj (a bowed […]