More on: music

I was warned by teachers and fellow artists against allowing my work to be influenced by others. But I have never really been convinced by the notion of being original.

The bow drops. The baton slips from a hand. Can one conduct trees? In the Lacrimosa the violins rush to set up tall trunks in an autumn wood. In the chancel amber leaves flicker. Death descends from the pulpit, a traveling peddler in rented garb. The church cracks open like a jewel case. A vaulting…

Not only were the largest of the church bells cast in pits, there, beneath the thrusting of the tower, at times the earthly founding of a bell came first, when walls rose above the mold, above the flower of bronze they sexed with a clapper, then block-and-tackled from the ground into some hymn or other,…

Some of MacMillan’s larger works—such as his song cycle Raising Sparks, or his Triduum—have something provocative, almost indecent about them. They make us, as poet Czeslaw Milosz put it, “blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail.”

Today it’s like water in the ear, a slow bleed in the brain, thinking of your bones and the marrow inside them. Last night, half-awake, I leaned into the siren as it passed and thought of Coltrane writing his liner-note prayer —it all has to do with it— and listened for the drumbeat of another…

In Image issue 86, filmmaker Samuel Gray Anderson writes about darkly poetic rocker Nick Cave—and how a nice guy became a fan of such violent, discordant music. Image: You write that you sometimes describe the last decade of your life like this: ten years ago you were a U2 fan and now you’re a partisan…

My mother was the first pianist I ever heard. All through childhood I was spellbound by her gift, her virtuosity. Now I welcome her to my house, show her the grand piano, and lift the lid to its full height and glory. I ask her to join me on the black bench. At ninety my…

Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) Writing the Record by Devon Powers (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) ( ) by Ethan Hayden (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)   AROUND THE TIME I started getting paychecks for writing about music, I tried to read the dense and difficult Aesthetics of Rock by the rock-critic-cum-philosopher…

To SSA and TBA AT TIMES I TELL MYSELF that the difference between me today and me a decade ago can be summed up by the fact that where I was once a devoted fan of U2, I am now a partisan of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I treat it as a joke, but…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…