As a sequel to my NPR show on Donald Trump’s incursions at the Kennedy Center, the NEH, and the NEA, here’s something Jimmy Kimmel said on TV the other night: Trump says he’s closing the Kennedy center for roughly two years, so it can be rebuilt into the finest performing arts facility on earth, with a reopening that will rival and surpass anything that’s ever happened … [Read more...] about Trump and the Arts — Take 2: Jimmy Kimmel on the Kennedy Center Shutdown
Trump and the Arts
The following article is an abridged adaptation of my January 22 NPR report on recent developments in government and the arts — at the NEA, the NEH, and the Kennedy Center -- under President Donald J. Trump. I write: "The arts sector feels invaded by aliens. The incursion is so abrupt, so rude, that it parallels the startling empowerment of Trump loyalists like Kristi … [Read more...] about Trump and the Arts
My New Novel: “The Disciple”
My forthcoming novel, The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age, may be my best book. A prequel to The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York (2023), it’s already available via pre-order. (And if you order both books, you get a discount.) My story tracks the prodigious American impact of Richard Wagner’s protégé Anton Seidl. It challenges obstinate stereotypes of Gilded … [Read more...] about My New Novel: “The Disciple”
John Luther Adams on “Why I Moved from the US to Australia”
A couple of my recent blogs – here and here -- have saluted John Luther Adams as “among the most esteemed present-day American composers for orchestra. . . . Encountering Adams’s Become Ocean on a 21st-century symphonic program is so fundamentally enthralling that it risks cliché. It is the proverbial oasis in the desert. The Sahara here is contemporary American … [Read more...] about John Luther Adams on “Why I Moved from the US to Australia”
“Ur Kind of Music?”
I cannot think of a better conversationalist about music, and about the state of things musical today, than the conductor Kenneth Woods. Ken is an American based in the UK, where he conducts the English Symphony Orchestra in Worcester and resides in Wales. He programs bravely and insightfully. He presides over a Mahler festival in Boulder and an Elgar festival in … [Read more...] about “Ur Kind of Music?”