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THOMAS WRIGHT WALLER, born in Harlem in 1904 and subsequently known to all the world as "Fats," is one of the few great jazz musicians to have been widely popular […]

Born two years and half a continent apart, Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong, the two most influential figures in the early history of jazz, emerged as major soloists on the […]

The Mark Morris Dance Group made its debut performance in 1980. It is argued that familiarity with Morris' work is required in order to understand it.

'Coppelia' is one of only seven full-evening 19th century ballets which are still performed as originally intended. Others include 'Giselle', 'Don Quixote', 'La Bayadere', 'Swan Lake', 'The Sleeping Beauty' and 'La Sylphide'. 'The Nutcracker' is invariably brought into a modern setting. It is argued that modern story ballets are less successful than their predecessors, however, every ballet, regardless of how abstract tells a story.

New York City Ballet has presented a range of recent ballets, by Peter Martins and others, varying in style from comfortably derivative to determinedly postmodern, most of which are not very good. Peter Martins is George Balanchine's successor as ballet master in chief and has had problems in adding works of lasting interest to the repertory of the company. Although there is creative energy in the modern-dance scene, modern dance is not attracting a significant audience. Its pioneers have not thought out the fundamental issues of institutional survival.

NO SOONER did the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp film of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd go into production than it became the subject of excited talk in American theater circles. Only one [...]

AT FIRST GLANCE, Igor Stravinsky appears to be the ideal subject for a biographer. He led an eventful life, traveled widely, knew many celebrities and was one himself, published a [...]

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers Mencken: The American Iconoclast. Oxford University Press, 662 pages, $35 One of the most popular television game shows of my youth was a program called To Tell [...]

ALEC WILDER, who died in 1980, was one of the least classifiable artists who has ever lived. A semi-classical composer who doubled as a sometime writer of popular songs, he [...]

TWO YEARS ago next month, I started a blog--that is, a 'web log,' a website on which I keep a public journal, written in collaboration with the Chicago-based literary critic [...]

CLASSICAL MUSIC in America is in an increasingly tight corner. Though many established performing groups continue to draw respectable crowds, most are finding it harder to do so, and even [...]

ARTIE SHAW, the clarinetist and band leader who died in January at the age of ninety-four, was the last surviving giant of the Swing Era, the decade-long interlude (1935-45) during [...]

ASIDE FROM what we glean by listening to their music, how do we know what we think we know about the inner lives of the great composers? Only two, Hector [...]

IN 1945, Arturo Toscanini told the music critic B.H. Haggin that he preferred Haydn to Mozart. 'I will tell you frankly: sometimes I find Mozart boring,' he said to his [...]

THE BARE facts of Isaac Bashevis Singer's life make for almost as good a story as any of the fictional tales he committed to paper in the course of his [...]

IN ENGLAND, Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934) is widely regarded as a great composer, one of the key figures of the late Romantic period. Elsewhere, he is known--if at all--for two [...]

WHAT MAKES a composer great? The quality of his music is the obvious answer--and the right one. But few listeners (and surprisingly few critics) are self-confident enough to vouch for [...]

IN THOMAS Harris's best-selling 1988 horror novel The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist turned serial killer, tells his captors that he is willing to help them track [...]

ALL ART is in some sense autobiographical, if only because it is self-expressive--a fact that many artists are understandably reluctant to admit. Jazz musicians, however, are more forthright than others [...]

LAST YEAR, for the first time, blank compact discs outsold pre-recorded ones. This statistic has been widely reported in the news media, usually in connection with the fact that sales [...]

ARTURO TOSCANINI was the most admired of 20th-century conductors--and, in certain circles, the most reviled. Throughout the first half of his seven-decade-long career, Toscanini was spoken and written of in [...]

IN 1927, the British music-hall duo Flotsam & Jetsam recorded a comic song, 'What Was the Matter with Rachmaninov?,' in which they lamented the popularity of the once-ubiquitous Prelude in [...]

'LET ME make the songs of a nation,' the Scottish statesman Andrew Fletcher declared in 1703, 'and I care not who makes its laws.' This oft-quoted remark applies with particular [...]

'STRANGE HOW potent cheap O music is,' Noel Coward wrote in Private Lives. That droll tribute to the power of popular song has been quoted countless times--but Coward, himself a [...]

FEW REPUTATIONS in classical music have fluctuated so widely as that of the German composer Paul Hindemith. From the mid1920's on, he was acknowledged both as one of the key [...]

FAR MORE people have heard the music of Miklos Rozsa than that of his countryman and fellow modernist Bela Bartok, but far fewer know his name. For more than four [...]

HOW DID artists and entertainers respond to the destruction of the World Trade Center? One early response came from the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a founding figure of the postwar [...]

THE TRUMPETER Louis Armstrong was universally recognized in his own lifetime as the key figure in the history of jazz. Though his reputation with the general pubfic went into a […]

THE BEATLES released Let It Be, the last of their thirteen albums, 36 years ago. (l) Today there is no one musical group or soloist capable of commanding the attention […]

One hundred years after his birth, George Gershwin is the most widely remembered of the songwriters who dominated American popular music between the end of World War I and the [...]

In 1961, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould canceled a scheduled appearance with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, claiming that he had developed a phobic reaction--in his words, 'something approaching [...]

Sixty years ago this January, Benny Goodman and his band appeared at New York's Carnegie Hall--the first time a full evening of jazz had been presented at the most celebrated [...]

For Decades, Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) and Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), the best-known French composers of the period between the two world wars, occupied the same pigeonhole: they both produced music that [...]

No jazz pianist of the postwar era is more widely admired than Bill Evans (1929-80). The cover of Everybody Digs Bill Evans, the 1958 album that first brought him to [...]

A CHAPTER in the history of American classical music is quietly drawing to a close, and--though unknown to most music lovers--another has already opened. For the past fifteen years, a [...]