At the New Yorker website may be found my list of Notable Performances and Recordings of 2021.
The Rest Is Noise Person of the Year is Herbert Blomstedt.
Some notable music books of 2021: Kira Thurman's Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (Cornell UP), William Robin's Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace (Oxford UP), Paul Griffiths's Mr. Beethoven (New York Review Books), Daphne A. Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP), Kelefa Sanneh's Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres (Penguin), Joseph L. Clarke's Echo's Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space (University of Pittsburgh Press), Micaela Baranello's The Operetta Empire: Music Theater in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna (University of California Press), Matthew Aucoin's The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera (FSG), Humphrey Burton's In My Own Time: An Autobiography (Boydell), and Emily Zazulia's Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing (Oxford UP).
Outside of music, I read with great enjoyment Patrick Keefe's Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Liz Brown's Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire, Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, Elizabeth Kolbert's Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles, Mark Harris's Mike Nichols: A Life, Herfried Münkler's Marx, Wagner Nietzsche: Welt im Umbruch, Melissa Homestead's The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, and George Prochnik's Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution.