I would never forget that frigid winter afternoon in January 2009, when I spent an hour walking in the entirely deserted Central Park, digesting and devouring my memory of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 that I had just heard at Avery Fisher Hall that morning—in fact, for once, not only because of Mahler, but also because it was a performance conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.

Last night, I had the honour of attending the New York Philharmonic’s performance of Symphony No. 8 (1906; p. 1910, Munich Exhibition Grounds) by Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), the symphony that brings the classical symphony to its historical finale. * * * * * * * *

Like the poems of Wang Wei, Li Bai, Mallarmé, or Pasolini, the Nocturnes of Fédéric Chopin are there to intoxicate us in dreams. If you have not tried it, pour yourself a glass of absinthe, imagine yourself in a Parisian café in 1830, watching a young man at the age of 20 casually breathing out poetry. The most exquisite pleasure is the moment at which you hold your glass right at your lips and find yourself being arrested by the music, and th...

What follows are reviews of all the covers of The Decemberists' song “Engine Driver” that I've been able to find on YouTube. The original is to the right, in case you don't know the song; though you may want to wait and reconstruct the original from its descendants (easily enough), below.

While dozing off on one of Los Angeles’s largest parking lots called the 405 Freeway on the first day of 2000, I overheard a rather stunning announcement from the KUSC classical radio station: “Now the 20th century is finally over. We can play some of the best pieces from this period on our radio station.” What constitutes the post-mortem life of music?

Another crazy week of houseguests, stimulation, and no time to put together something serious. So let me give you a few things to read or look at. 1. David Cook's cover of Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean” from a few weeks ago on American Idol. Lovely, in (I think) 3/4 time. In general this season of Idol is a pretty good one, with the unusual difference that the men's voices are much stronger than the women's. David Archeleta is pro...

I had been meaning, over the holidays, to write something about the value of silence. The seasonal onslaught of piped-in music as well as an article in Salon had gotten me thinking about the excessive presence of music in our lives. This, alas, is hardly an original topic, and I never came up with enough of a thoughtlette to put together a post. On the way to work the other day, however, my new ipod shuffled its way into Gillian Welch’s “I Dre...

I saw Ted Leo and his band play recently at a converted movie theater in South Philly. Leo crouches before a down-tilted mike and aims his voice up at it, spraying his sine wave vocals out like Silly String. When he's not singing he comes up with a few sideways leg spasms that don't look much better on him than they did on Pete Townshend thirty years ago. Between songs he really wants to talk but the crowd isn't having any.

Can one possibly greet news of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the Definitive 200 albums with anything but weary disdain? A disdain which quickly turns to despair and strained confusion on seeing the actual list?

I'm trying to cover more ground in fewer steps this year, so here are three quick capsule reviews of albums that might be worth checking out.

Matthew Miller was a Jewish stoner who dropped out of high school in upstate New York to follow the hippie jam-band Phish around the country. He grew his hair in dreadlocks and listened to Grateful Dead tapes. After finishing his studies at a wilderness school in Oregon, where he rapped at open mikes and practiced beatboxing in his bedroom, he moved to New York to attend college at the lefty-alternative New School. Sometime around 2001, he ...

As I start this list, I can’t be sure what it will look like. Reader, you are seeing me examine my conscience and memory in real-time. I was going to list my ten favorite books of 2006, but a few other things began to obtrude that weren’t books, but had become part of my thinking during this year. So I assimilate them all, in the spirit of multimedia, to things “ripped” to my operating memory: scans lodged on the hard disk, items of mental fur...

I think I spend more time reading about music than listening to it. Why? Well, it takes about two minutes to read a review of an album and over an hour to actually hear it, not counting the time it takes me to find, download and sequence each of the tracks. I spend eight hours a day at a desk job where I can read Pitchfork and Metacritic but can't use Limewire to actually get a hold of the music I'm reading about. Once I get home there's a...

In a world crammed so chock full of stupidities that some days it seems ready to burst, one in particular which has been annoying me for literally decades is a lyric from Bob Geldof’s 1984 famine-relief benefit track which goes, Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

The lights went up on six guys in dark suits and black hats, looking like a high school production of a western saloon scene. The short one standing in front of the keyboards was the singer. His suit had a tuxedo stripe of midnight blue glitter and the brim of his hat was ringed with silver medallions. As they roared into their first number, his voice came on abrasive and overpowering like the forgotten smell of aftershave on my father's ro...

I saw the pricey video for Regina Spektor’s single “Fidelity” on New York Noise a couple weeks ago and thought it was really great, but in the very same instant started worrying that New York Noise had taken the first step toward going mainstream. Apparently that is what some critics have been saying about Spektor herself.

I never liked the term World Music. As an adjective, “world” seems to carry a false pretension to greater warmth and caring than its more neutral predecessor “international” did. Also I suspect some condescension and unexamined exoticism lurks in the phrase. In the literal sense all music is from the world, of course, so really what one is saying is “from the rest of the world,” an emphasis that implies place of origin is either all this h...

Neil Young’s latest release “Living With War” is a full-length protest album. Here is a list of things other than war which in the first three songs he mentions not needing: haircut, shoeshine, sunshine, purple haze, tidal wave, mass grave, Madison Avenue and diarrhea. I find it hard to say if this is a lazy laundry list or the effective use of a recurring motif. Many of the songs have trumpets or choirs, which give the feeling he is leadin...

If you say that Stephen Morrissey is the best singer of his generation, who are you even comparing him to? In a way it’s a false question because the greatness of Morrissey is that he is not of his generation; he’s not a rock singer. Rock was bad for singing. In the broader perspective, it is a set of strategies for hiding the fact that you can't sing: wild man shouting, having an interesting voice, cranking up the guitars or at best produ...

Okkervil River is a band whose name sounds like an album title, while their album title “Black Sheep Boy” sounds more like the name of a band. The concept of the album is that it expands the 1967 folk-rock song “Black Sheep Boy” by Tim Hardin, which is about a traveller who comes back to his hometown for a rest. The tired man asks the people he meets to leave him in peace and not ask him questions, and ends his song by reminding them that a ...

Arcade Fire’s Funeral was judged the #1 album of 2004 by Pitchfork, #6 by the Voice’s critics poll and #7 by Metacritic. Interestingly enough, of Pitchfork’s 25 reviewers, only 3 actually chose Funeral as their #1 of the year; even then it’s ambiguous whether they were choosing it as their personal favorite or more generally as the best all-around. It was ranked by the others at 21, 18, 4, 17, 5, 8, 32, 41, 34, 45, 42 and 15, while ten did ...

If blogging about your mix is “like saying you’re baking special birthday cupcakes for all your cats,” then this is the restaurant review. A day late and an idea short, this week I offer some piggyback commentary on S Shirazi’s Awesome 2005 Mix.

I tried to make a mix disc of the best singles of the year but the transitions weren’t good and it came out a little too punchy, so I replaced a couple of the up-tempo numbers to smooth it out and made it more of an introduction to the year's best bands. Picking the songs is always the easy part of making a mix; the hard part is choosing the order. Making a mix is itself an act of composition, assembling finished parts into a longer work. I...

Dostoevsky said his generation of Russian authors all came out from under Gogol's overcoat. One might say of today's best pop singers that they came out from under Morrissey's pompadour.