among them a historian who had won a MacArthur prize. We’d all been to an art opening, and, over dinner, a painter among us was holding forth on the work we’d seen. “As you know,” he said, bringing in ...

How did I miss this before today? Well, thanks to the sublime Maria Popova and her site Brain Pickings, I am now among the millions of folks who have encountered the equally sublime Vi Hart on YouTube ...

The French composer – a postwar pupil of Messaien’s – wrote only a handful of works. Collot’s new recording shows his Piano Sonata to be one of the great achievements of serialism When Jean Barraqué ...

Serialism for Kids, presented by Concord Conservatory of Music piano faculty member Kitty Cheung-Evans, will be held from 10 to 10:50 a.m. March 20. Serialism is a unique way to write music without ...

Greg Sandow doesn’t mention the crucial rule of classic 12-tone (or dodecaphonic) music: that no tone may be repeated until all 12 tones in the row have been used (“Serialism as a Museum Piece,” The ...

If those late 1930s audiences only knew, as audiences at director Rebecca Taichman's graceful and visually surprising Roundabout production now know, the even greater horrors that would lie ahead. In ...

Richard Rodney Bennett once described Pierre Boulez as “a spectacular musician’’ and, for different reasons, the same epithet could have applied to himself. Prodigiously gifted, Bennett began informal ...

This is the final article in “The Postmodern Temper,” a series which examined the contemporary state of various artistic fields. Publication is made possible with support from the “New Works” Program ...