The night Brian Buczak died, fireworks lit up the sky. It was July 4, 1987, and his bed at New York University’s hospital on the East River overlooked the holiday celebrations. Buczak’s partner, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, a prolific painter of clouds, was struck by the beauty of what …
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Sunday is the 150th anniversary of the composer Charles Ives’s birth, and the most fitting way to celebrate would be to bang your fists on the table and rail against the damned closed-mindedness of classical music, with its lazy dependence on a predictable canon. But honestly, that’s old news; a …
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When Arnold Schoenberg conducted the premiere of “Pelleas und Melisande,” his symphonic poem based on the somber fairy-tale that inspired Debussy’s opera, in 1905, it was in front of a hostile Viennese audience. Reviews were “unusually violent,” the composer would later recall, with one critic suggesting he be committed to …
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Home is a slippery concept in classical music, a global art form of constant travel and jobs that require relocating for months or years at a time. The superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who will become the New York Philharmonic’s next music and artistic director in 2026, is based in Madrid …
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