The Brooklyn Rail

There’s something irreplaceably human about our voices. How we talk and sing is unique to each one of us, even though a voice can be broken down into its component elements of pitch, duration, volume, and timbre. Those details provide the perfect substrate for technological transformation—the threat of the inhuman.

Brooklyn-based experimental baritone saxophonist Jonah Parzen-Johnson uses his horn alongside pre-programmed synthesizers and electronic instruments to develop sparse melodic motifs that evolve into complex compositions.

A biography is the story of how a person came to be their true self. That’s often a compelling journey, particularly in the case of an artist, and the value in telling it goes up exponentially when the subject is someone who has been too little known in their life and legacy.

Compared to the oud, the guitar is something of a newcomer. Some version of this pear-shaped, fretless instrument has been central to the music of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) for thousands of years.

Composer and vocalist Paul Pinto’s new operatic monodrama, MANO A MANO, opens on a bit of dazzling wordplay: a history of Western writers, rulers, and kings, from Homer to King Arthur and beyond.

In New York, with the average rent costing more than three thousand bucks a month, it’s hard to find the balance between making enough to survive while dedicating time to make music inspired by what Pearl S. Buck called “the overpowering necessity to create.”

The Talea Ensemble, one of the most exacting and serious new music ensembles in New York, has been bouncing around from venue to venue since pianist-composer Anthony Cheung and percussionist Alex Lipowski founded the group in 2007.

One of the great recurring musical events in New York is the long-running Wednesday night residency by the Mandingo Ambassadors at Barbès.

Music is repetition and change, within each piece and in the overall course of music. Having only time with which to work, music lays out sequences of organized sonic events through linear time.

The gloriously quirked Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg has an ongoing taste for themed sequences of concerts, and Arctic Voices offered performances of the type that most listeners will have had few opportunities to experience, all lined up during a four-day celebration of these multiple aspects.

Nora Brown's banjo picking is bold and precise, yet the collective notes are liminal: the song a redolent musing. Her narrow fingers narrate the margins of a misty picture, beckoning onlookers to close their eyes and see the mountains where old-time music first echoed.

There is Winter Jazzfest in New York City (completely bursting), and then there is Winterjazz in Cologne (smaller, faster, but still completely bursting). The latter just celebrated its fifteenth edition, revolving around the Stadtgarten venue, which opened nearly four decades ago and soon became central to the jazz and improvised music scene of Cologne.

For a relatively short (three-hundred pages) book on an enormous subject, it may seem impossible to be comprehensive. But Gibbs has the advantage of being one of music’s great inside-men, and he discerningly and wisely spins out the particular—and the personal—into the universal.

From March 3 to 8, the New Colossus Festival will bring more than one hundred and seventy bands and solo artists to New York. The majority will come from abroad: festival founders Mike Bell and Steven Matrick found that export offices from various countries would provide funds to bands to bring them to the city. 

Julia Heyward began performing her monologue-based pieces in the 1970s. These one-woman events were mixtures of spoken word, chanting, and vocal manipulations that combined her fascination with Mongolian throat singing and sub-Saharan African yodeling with a melodic sense of language inherited from her father, a South Carolina preacher. 

Niño de Elche—the kind of moniker adopted by singers and bullfighters for centuries—moved as a teenager to Seville with the intention of becoming the new Miguel Poveda. The plan was derailed as he came into contact with the city’s avant-garde and grew more experimental.

The World Music Institute (WMI) is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year. Because of this great organization, New Yorkers have been able to experience top-tier music and dance from Afghanistan, Cuba, India, Mexico, Gambia, Ireland, and scores of other countries. 

Streaming means hunting in an endless cycle of killing, consuming, and excreting. While the concept has room for valuing music and reducing the amount of sheer stuff, the practice is inseparable from human nature and capitalist economies. And not all stuff is created equal, there’s lots of it worth collecting.

A neighborhood musician sets up in the bar with their guitar, modestly sings some favorite songs for the fun of it and for a few tips, maybe a couple free pours from the bartender. It’s amateur but in the good way of being no-stakes and generous and social. Would you pay a fifteen-dollar cover charge for that?

Oslo World is one of those festivals that inhabits an entire city, presenting events in venues that range from concert halls to small bars, churches to clubs, folk halls to jazz clubs. It has no hierarchy of native countries, and no bias toward either folk purity or deejay bastardization.

Minimalist art demands the kind of attention that keeps us from racing away from ourselves, our problems, and our possibilities. It’s a useful model at this moment when we desperately need to slow the rush to tear things down before we have any reasonable idea what do with the ruins we are creating.

Opera and horror thrive on excess. Both often take contemporary topics and process them through a theatrical lens, producing works that are exaggerated, sometimes even to the point of camp. As someone with a strange devotion to both, I’m fascinated by the ways in which they overlap.

When Metropolitan Opera general director Peter Gelb stepped out on stage before the season opening premiere of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay to proclaim that the Met was dedicated to freedom of artistic expression, he likely never thought that he would be showing himself an utter cynic.

The Norwegian electroacoustic trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær became the artistic director of Kraków’s long-established Jazz Juniors festival in 2024. Next year has it hitting fifty, but this forty-ninth edition served as a fitting preparation to a presumed higher climax in 2026.

As a performer, ganavya is remarkably inward and self-effacing. She seeks to involve the audience in her sonic journey, eliciting humming ringing tones and repeated selected lyrics. Yet it is her voice—unmistakable, indelible—that is the binding force of her art.

Brian Harnetty is a composer based in Columbus, Ohio. Many of his works and projects begin from listening to audio from sources—spoken word, field recordings, music. Noisy Memory is about the process of listening to and engaging with these found sounds. It is also a memoir of sorts.

Ostrava Days festival is a smoldering furnace of new music with an emphasis on established experimental figures sharing an environment with emerging student composers. The program will typically combine old “classic” pieces with world premieres, separate days devoted to string quartets, jazz, and improvisation.

TIME:SPANS festival has felt increasingly tantalizing and frustrating since 2020. Every program, every piece, is an opportunity to surprise and even fail, constructively. The sense of safety in classical music programming writ large atrophies the music in society, and New Music, especially, is the place to leap off a cliff and see if you can land on your feet. Excite people, in other words.

Of all the orchestral instruments, the cello may be the most lovable. There is something about its declarative alto voice that stirs and soothes. The violin often gets top billing, the piano encompasses all with its great range, but the cello unfailingly speaks to us. 

In dangerous, reactionary, confusing times, Ukrainian soprano, conductor, and curator Viktoriia Vitrenko stands out as one of the leading voices of her generation in European contemporary music. At the beginning of this year, Vitrenko released her first solo album, Limbo (Kyiv Dispatch)—dedicated to Belarusian musician and activist Maria Kalesnikava—a powerful artistic response to isolation, trauma, and political injustice.

The headlines pile up, crashing into each other. Sense becomes nonsense. Six months into Trump’s second term, many of us read the newspaper slack-jawed, tense with wonder about what could possibly come next.

Gene Scheer is a songwriter, stage performer, and a lyricist for other composers. Expand that last in every way, and he’s also one of the major opera librettists in contemporary music. He’s tackled the adaptation of major literary works for the stage, now including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, premiering at the Metropolitan Opera on September 21.