Music
Singer-Songwriters Confess Their Feelings: Mitski, Nick Cave, Jamila Woods, Angel Olsen
When personal expression is your aesthetic mode, then aesthetic quality depends on quality of personality.
Music
Music
Travis Scott's Ambience
There’s a paradox at the heart of this music: constructing a simulation of hedonism takes extraordinary discipline.
Music
Ben Franklin’s Glass Instrument Stirs Back to Life
In 1761, Benjamin Franklin invented an instrument eventually thought by some to drive its players out of their minds: the armonica, which produced the same echoing, high-pitched sounds as singing water glasses. Made of glass bowls nested into one another, with the entire stack skewered with a spindle, the instrument
News
Researchers Restore First Recording of Computer Music, Made in Alan Turing’s Lab
The 1951 recording of three songs played on Turing's computer has been restored to its intended sound.
Music
Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize
Whether or not he raised popular music to the level of literature — a meaningless claim lazy boomers have been pushing on the younger generation for years — he certainly assumed the role of the Romantic author-genius in a popular context and made the resulting dialectic thrilling as hell.
Art
Reissuing the Voyager Golden Record, NASA's Quixotic Message to the Stars
Louis Armstrong performing "Melancholy Blues," Mozart's Queen of the Night aria, and panpipes from Peru are etched among the cacophony of Earth sounds on the gold-plated records attached to Voyager 1 and 2.
Art
A Village of Musical Architecture Inaugurates Its First Permanent Space
NEW ORLEANS — This weekend the roving Music Box Village of New Orleans will welcome the public to its first permanent space with two days of performances.
Music
K-Popsicle: Gfriend, Taemin, Red Velvet, Mamamoo
Faced with the choice between genuine American pop music and the perfect facsimiles crafted by foreign scientist-geniuses running computer algorithms on said pop music (you think I’m exaggerating; read John Seabrook), I’d still pick the American stuff.
Music
How Do Rock Heroes Sing?: Beyoncé, Rihanna, and the Megastar Vocal Style
The relevant split isn’t rock vs. pop (both are “pop” artists) but expressive vs. functional, always the key distinction in how pop music presents itself.
Music
Prince's 'Sign o’ the Times,' Part II (The Law of Genre)
Since genre is a perceived, externally imposed category rather than an intrinsic musical element, the job of assigning genre usually falls to the critic.
Music
Prince's 'Sign o’ the Times,' Part I (A Solitary Genius)
For an ostensible masterpiece, Prince’s Sign o’ the Times (1987) is suspiciously lacking in overt concept.
Books
Photographing a Steinway Piano Being Put Together
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an example of the first 88-key piano model built by Steinway & Sons in 1868, its rosewood case containing an inventive cast-iron frame held aloft by three ornate legs.