Author: Alex Ross

The Chameleon. The New Yorker, Sept. 15, 2025.

I’ve long loved Bohuslav Martinů’s music, but until this summer’s Bard Music Festival I had never found an occasion to write about him at length. I emerged with my admiration redoubled. Martinů is at once unmistakable and elusive, a kind of Monsieur Hulot among composers. The companion volume to this year’s festival, Martinů and His World (University of Chicago Press), was edited by Aleš Brezina and Michael Beckerman. One especially valuable chapter is devoted to the composer’s “Notebook of Dreams,” which recently fell into Beckerman’s hands and which he has edited for publication. A typical entry, translated from the French: “The key to everything premeditated, desired, created by trick [ruse] will finally be found [out]. Whatever is made naturally remains mysterious.” I also read Martin Crump’s Martinů and the Symphony (Toccata Classics), which notes that nowhere in his six numbered symphonies does Martinů use the fff marking — a sign of his aversion to the “climax cliché.” If you are looking to explore Martinů’s world, there is no better place to begin than with Jiří Bělohlávek’s near-definitive BBC Symphony survey of the symphonies, on Onyx. Charles Munch’s Boston Symphony recording of the Sixth is an essential, explosive supplement.

“I have four razors and a dictaphone.”
           — Andrey Tarkovsky, 1979

After twenty-one years at Typepad, my blog has found a new home at WordPress. Many problems are still to be solved, not least the clunkily improvised design, but I’ve managed to import most of the material — hundreds of audio files, thousands of images, more than a million words. The book-related audio guides are more or less operational. Apologies for the disarray during the ongoing renovation.

In 1973, Andrei Tarkovsky was pondering an adaptation of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, as his diaries report: "I am taking on an immense burden. Mann's Doctor Faustus is an elaborate amalgam of the author's past life, his shattered hopes, longing for his lost homeland, thoughts about suffering, about the torments of the artist, about his sinfulness. On the one hand he (the artist) is an ordinary person. On the other he cannot be ordinary, and consequently he pays for his talent with his soul. Talent is not given to man by God; rather man is doomed to carry the cross of talent. For the artist is a being who strives (but not in secret or in hiding, nor moving in circles, nor in the spaciousness of some kind of ecological niche) to master ultimate truth. The artist masters that truth every time he creates something perfect, something whole. But here one is assailed by a thousand other sounds, a thousand other questions. It is important to compare the man who is looking for the truth with the man who ignores it, or is simply not interested. Probably our Committee will simply not give me this work; so I shall have to fight for it."

If anyone could have filmed the unfilmable…

A memorable day and night at Galka Scheyer’s.

Will Robin makes a welcome return to The New Yorker with an assessment of Terry Riley’s classic Columbia albums.

Garrett Graff: "The United States, just months before its 250^th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed."

The fifteen-year-old Dika Newlin greets the nine-year-old Lorin Maazel after a performance of her Cradle Song in 1939.

Schoenberg was immensely proud of his son's tennis achievements, although he became uneasy when he realized that in some circles he was known merely as "Ronny's father."

The University of North Texas Digital Library has made available some materials relating to the singular Dika Newlin, who began her musical career as a child-prodigy student of Schoenberg and ended as a punk-rock performance artist, with many notable publications, provocations, and pedagogical achievements in between. Especially striking is a 1972 recital that begins somewhat normally, with an eclectic grouping of Joplin, Feldman, and Ives; ventures into the electronic-experimental, with works by Julia Morrison and Newlin herself; and finally leaps into the absurd, with a pseudo-Babbitty lecture on "Serial Music" and a rendition of Cage's 4'33" that goes completely off the rails. Broken chords, Newlin tells us, are "non-simultaneous simultaneities."

Like thousands of others, I've fallen in love with Jackie and Shadow, the bald-eagle couple who nest in a Jeffrey pine high above Big Bear Lake, California. One of the scattered joys of this grim year has been watching Jackie and Shadow raise two plucky eaglets, Sunny and Gizmo. (Local schoolkids chose the names.) Expertly positioned cameras allow fans to observe the family at close range. This video features several conversational exchanges between Jackie and Shadow, who are empty-nesters for the moment, Sunny and Gizmo having gone off on their Grand Journeys, as aquiline lingo has it. Eaglesong can't be described as conventionally musical, but it has a distinctive contour, designed, perhaps, to cut across large distances. Something remarkable happens at 10:45. A nocturnal marital chat seems to prompt a howl from a solitary coyote, whereupon a veritable oratorio of coyote calls ensues, echoing in the valley around the lake. Beneath it all is a pedal point of crickets.