Daniel J. Kushner
Daniel J. Kushner is a Brooklyn-based music critic whose work has also been published in Opera News and Symphony. @danieljkushner.
RABBIT REDUX: The Music of Sufjan Stevens for String Quartet
By Daniel J. KushnerThe sound of an electronic organ swirls upward through a sludgy backbeat, as digitized woodwinds sparkle. The shimmering ambience soon gives way to a beat-driven din that inundates the listener.
The 2009 New Yorker Festival: A MINI-MUSIC SAMPLER
By Daniel J. KushnerThe New Yorker Festival is a celebration of ideas, with provocative discussions about politics, business, film, theater, and literature. But how do you best present poignant ideas when they are sung rather than spoken?
A PRECARIOUS FLAG IS PLANTED: AMERICAN (INDIE) SONGBOOK AT LINCOLN CENTER
By Daniel J. KushnerWhat happens when three indie music groups crash Lincoln Center’s 2010 American Songbook series?
Matt Marks’s The Little Death: Killing Them Softly with Sentiment
By Daniel J. KushnerA “post-Christian nihilist pop opera” sounds like a strange, nearly impossible amalgam to synthesize. But for Brooklyn-based composer Matt Marks and his chief co-conspirator, vocalist Mellissa Hughes (both raised in the Southern Baptist tradition), The Little Death—which Marks began writing in the summer of 2007—is the result of relentless “tinkering” and indiscriminately drawing from a reservoir of dizzying musical touchstones and the moods and emotions they engender.
