The historical truth about our 18th and 19th century leaders is that many of them liked music and art...

Did Lillian Hellman closely model the rapacious behavior of the Hubbard family in her 1939 play "The Little Foxes" on her up-close-and-personal observation of the Gershwin family?

Believe it or not, there was a time when American classical music critics were public figures....

But to me, modern and postmodern aesthetics have perversely turned beauty into the Wallflower of Art. It’s revenge of the nerds.

An artist’s view of a fellow artist has a different kind of validity than a critic’s or scholar’s.

I would find Cage more interesting if once in a while he had written a sonata, or Reich a piece unrooted in a phased motor groove....

If there’s anyone in our too-soon-for-judgment epoch closer than Diamanda Galás to being a modern “classic,” I don’t know who it is.

Professional singers and dancers have always been trained to think of their bodies as delicate instruments that need constant maintenance.

Paul Bowles may have been unique among composers in pursuing two acclaimed art careers at different times of life.

I had the best damn time I’ve had at any new opera in years....

“It is nearly impossible to make a living exclusively as a serious composer,” wrote financially successful William Bolcom in the March 1990 issue of Musical America.

We all have heard stories about celebrated conductors with deficient ears. But composers are supposed to be able to hear what they wrote....

A good ear is not synonymous with a good creative gift. William Butler Yeats was a poor speller, but he still won the Nobel Prize for Literature...

The fact remains that the single most career-making figure for any new composer is an orchestra conductor who decides to champion him.

Leo Ornstein wrote muscular piano sonatas into his late 90s; at 100 he wrote Vivian Perlis, “I still try to work, but on a much-reduced schedule.”

Well, of course they were a disgrace—what else can one call music performed by slave masters which mockingly imitates their enslaved charges?.....

What would the world’s understanding of Bach and Beethoven be if their music had come down to us only on a studio overdubbing by Phil Ramone or a “wall of sound” rendering by Phil Spector?

Is this all a way of saying that NMT’s relationship to traditional opera and musical theatre is like that of alternate or indie rock to mainstream?

Enya, U2, Bob Geldof, Sinéad O’Connor, Van Morrison—perhaps no other country of its small size has contributed so disproportionately to international pop than Ireland.

Classically trained composers have often sought (even craved) not just the money but the
cultural validation of success in commercial media. But what happens when a composer trades his native voice for a chance to work and win?

Imagine a graduate seminar for creative writers who read only Don DeLillo and Richard Ford and don’t even investigate Tolstoy, Dickens, or Keats.

Some of these composers of soundtrack music, who are among history’s most widely heard composers, died totally unknown and unheralded.

Freud, who birthed psychoanalysis in that most Mahlerianly musical of atmospheres, fin-de-siècle Vienna, despised music, according to his nephew. Vladimir Nabokov was unmusical and disdained music....

Despite good faith intentions, virality of video is uncheckable in our contemporary culture (unless you’re a corporate giant with limitless litigation resources), and it is defeating the intellectual property rights that ASCAP and BMI, among other groups, were founded to protect.

He was also, arguably, the all-American granddaddy of slam poetry and jazz vocalese, and a co-inventor (and practitioner) of Schoenbergian sprechstimme. Some people have also seen him as a forerunner of rap and hip-hop...

Clearly Bernstein still matters, but does West Side Story, in today’s musical theater world? Broadway never really picked up his cue, that symphonic continuity could meld the gutbucket vernacular.

Nobody seems to have addressed the elephant in the room: The concert hall is itself a fine musical instrument—an instrument that is an indissoluble constituent of the....

Without a doubt it was Meyer, more than any other prestige editor in publishing, who valorized the scholarly treatment of pop culture...

How many of history’s known (and even “great”) composers are, effectively, “mis-known”-either through insufficient performance of the bulk of their output, or through actual suppression of significant chunks of their oeuvres?