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Painting of Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles.

How Arnold Schoenberg Changed Hollywood

He moved to California during the Nazi era, and his music—which ranged from the lushly melodic to the rigorously atonal—caught the ears of everyone.
by Alex Ross via The New Yorker on March 11, 2024
Cover of sheet music for “Euphonic Sounds: A Syncopated Novelty” by Scott Joplin (1909).

Scott Joplin

The ragtime composer's life, career, and resurrection.
by Alan Jacobs via Comment on April 24, 2023
Studio portrait of American violinist Maud Powell, c. 1909

Women, Men, and Classical Music

As more women embraced music as a profession, more men became worried that the world of the orchestra was losing its masculinity.
by Livia Gershon, Gavin James Campbell via JSTOR Daily on May 23, 2022
Portraits of Dean Dixon, William Grant Still, and Margaret Bonds, three African American classical musicians.

A Prophecy Unfulfilled?

What a new book and six companion videos have to say about the fate of Black classical music in America.
by Mark N. Grant via The American Scholar on April 2, 2022
Clockwise from left: William Dawson, Marian Anderson, William Grant Still, Florence Price. Background features the score of Price’s Violin Concerto No. 2.

Classical Music and the Color Line

Despite its universalist claims, the field is reckoning with a long legacy of racial exclusion.
by Douglas Shadle via Boston Review on December 15, 2021
Wolfgang van Beethoven.

How Young America Came to Love Beethoven

On the 250th anniversary of the famous composer’s birth, the story of how his music first took hold across the Atlantic.
by Nora McGreevy via Smithsonian on December 16, 2020

Nationalist Anthems

Remembering a time when composers mattered more.
by Sudip Bose via The American Scholar on December 2, 2019

Black Beethoven and the Racial Politics of Music History

How the attempt to claim Beethoven as Black actually recycles racist tropes.
by Nicholas T. Rinehart via Transition on November 13, 2013
Illustration of Edmond Dédé.

An 1887 Opera by a Black Composer Finally Surfaces

Edmond Dédé’s “Morgiane” shows how diversity initiatives can promote works of real cultural value.
by Alex Ross via The New Yorker on February 24, 2025
A drawing of two speakers resting on clouds and sending colorful soundwaves through the air.

Bluetooth Speakers Are Ruining Music

You have two ears for a reason.
by Michael J. Owens via The Atlantic on February 5, 2025
Gustav Mahler; Charles Ives.

Anchoring Shards of Memory

We don’t often associate Charles Ives and Gustav Mahler, but both composers mined the past to root themselves in an unstable present.
by Joseph Horowitz via The American Scholar on September 9, 2024
Leonard Bernstein smoking a cigarette

The Bernstein Enigma

In narrowly focusing on Leonard Bernstein’s tortured personal life, "Maestro" fails to explore his tortured artistic life.
by Philip Clark via New York Review of Books on January 17, 2024
Mother-daughter opera singers Givonna Joseph and Aria Mason.

The Black Composers of New Orleans Opera Are Finally Getting Their Due

And it's all thanks to this mother-daughter dream team.
by Shoshi Parks via Atlas Obscura on September 13, 2023
The Fisk University Jubilee Singers on tour at the court of Queen Victoria in 1873, painted by Edmund Havel.

‘Dvorák’s Prophecy’ Review: America’s Silent Tradition

The Czech composer came to New York with the conviction that African-American melodies would be the ‘seedbed’ for their nation’s 20th-century music.
by John Check via The Wall Street Journal on January 28, 2022
Marian Anderson studying a musical score with the pianist Kurt Johnen, Berlin, 1931

Black Voices, German Song

What did German listeners hear when African American singers performed Schubert or Brahms?
by Adam Kirsch via New York Review of Books on January 20, 2022
Still from "Apocolypse Now"

How a Wagner Opera Defined the Sound of Hollywood Blockbusters

“Ride of the Valkyries” has been featured in hundreds of films, including 'The Birth of a Nation,' 'Jarhead,' and most famously, Apocalypse Now.'
by Alex Ross via The New Yorker on September 15, 2020
Cartoon by Joey Perr; a man in a top hat and holding a monacle studies a sign broadcasting Ella Fitzgerald as music notes fill the air.

What’s Going On

The vexed history of "Night Life" in the New Yorker.
by Phillip Golub via The Drift on May 22, 2020

An Ives Fourth

Nostalgia or nightmare?
by Sudip Bose via The American Scholar on July 4, 2019

The “Star-Spangled Banner” Hysteria of 1917

The Boston Symphony’s refusal to play the national anthem in its one concerts triggered a xenophobic panic that led an arrest.
by Alex Ross via The New Yorker on July 2, 2019

How 'Green Book' And The Hollywood Machine Swallowed Donald Shirley Whole

Why relatives of the musician depicted in "Green Book" called the film “a symphony of lies.”
by Brooke Obie via Shadow and Act on December 14, 2018
A drawing of a crowd watching a baseball game in 1886.

Before ‘Fans,’ There Were ‘Kranks,’ ‘Longhairs,’ and ‘Lions’

How do fandoms gain their names?
by Elizabeth Minkel via Atlas Obscura on May 30, 2024
Shirley Horn in a publicity shot, 1960.

How to Take It Slow

Following the rhythm of Shirley Horn.
by Lauren Du Graf via Oxford American on December 5, 2023
A musician wearing a Moog hat and playing a Moog synthesizer in a recording studio

The Sounds of Science

The Moog synthesizer was one of the most influential inventions in 20th-century sound. With the recent sale of the Asheville-based company, a new era begins.
by Reanna Cruz via The Bitter Southerner on October 31, 2023
A picture of the author as a teenager with his parents, in his bedroom decorated with rock music posters.

My Dad and Kurt Cobain

When my father moved to Taiwan, a fax machine and a shared love of music bridged an ocean.
by Hua Hsu via The New Yorker on August 15, 2022
A screencap from Looney Tunes featuring Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

Hungry Like the Rabbit

On the HBO Max streaming service, with their skipped numbers, the episodes omitted from the 31 seasons of Looney Tunes are easy to spot.
by James Panero via The Spectator on January 13, 2021

A Little Bit Softer Now, a Little Bit Softer Now…

The gradual decline of the fade-out in popular music.
by William Weir via Slate on September 15, 2014

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