Author: Michael Schell

Seattle Symphony has unveiled its 2023–24 season. The contemporary music offerings are something of a disappointment, but there are nevertheless several highlights to look forward to.

Taken collectively, this year’s list reveals the remarkable depth, breath and quality of what we call “new music”, but it also conveys a certain tentativeness—one that perhaps befits a crossroads…

I was gratified to discover that Lash’s 45-minute work manages to avoid the clichés and sentimentality to which much of the harp repertory is prone.

Two years ago, the late Noah Creshevsky said "today's best seats are in our own homes or wherever we may be, listening to music through speakers or headphones, in chairs…

When Michael Tippett composed The Ice Break, he was already in his early 70s. Set in a contemporary country (the US is strongly implied), and with characters caught up in…

Few composers have embraced the Webernian aesthetic of brevity more closely than the Hungarian György Kurtág (b.1926). Starting with his earliest canonical work, the Op. 1 String Quartet (1959), he…

Though our decade technically has another year to go, the marketing appeal of “Hits of the XXs” type formulations tends to overwhelm such semantic niceties. So as we leave the…

It’s tough to say goodbye forever to Woody Vasulka, pioneer of experimental video and co-founder (with his widow Steina) of The Kitchen in New York. It was his 40-minute “video…

Seattle Symphony’s [untitled] series was inaugurated in 2012 by its then-new Music Director, Ludovic Morlot. Three Fridays a year, small groupings of Symphony and visiting musicians set up in the…

Destruction and reclamation, gimmick and avant-garde One of the odder fads bequeathed to us by the 1960s is the ritual destruction of musical instruments. It’s a custom most famously associated…