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 ...

How to get your hands on Total Serialism's ne plus ultra ... if you have a spare few thousand or two to spare. Otherwise let’s hope that a public institution bid for the fascinating and illuminating ...

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 ...

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 ...

Rochberg said that it was the death of his son, Paul, in 1964, of brain cancer, that caused his break with serialism. The 12-tone palate became for him “finished, empty, meaningless,” he told the ...

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 ...