Music

When he first read Amiri Baraka’s epochal study “Blues People: Negro Music in White America,” originally published in 1963, Russell Gunn felt that he already understood, on some level, the book’s urgent...

That primal songwriting scene in the parking lot serves as a reminder that new songs come, at least in part, from old songs. Standard country music templates like the heartbreak tale or...

The Ukrainian violinist Solomia Onyskiv arrived in the United States last month on a mission.With the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country approaching, she worried that the world was...

Despite being billed as an opera, “Russia: Today” has no apparent plot; instead, the material is framed as an hourlong Orthodox memorial service, moving from opening prayers through lamentation to a kind...

KELLER I got to work with Bob on “The Magic Flute” at the Paris Opera in 1991. And one of the other Met assistants, Robin Guarino, had worked with him on “Hamletmachine”...

And it’s not exactly neutral in the context of Wagner. Even if he wrote long before the rise of the Nazis, his works were tainted by his notorious antisemitism and, decades after...

The King’s Singers, a renowned British a cappella ensemble, looked forward to its appearance last week at Pensacola Christian College in Florida, the final stop on the group’s four-city tour of the...

“My father stopped talking to me for three months,” she recalled. “He was like, ‘No, you can’t do that. You are throwing away seven years of our hard work. I know who...

The Market Hotel, a gritty music club in Brooklyn that shakes every time the subway rumbles overhead, gets its share of rowdy performances. But even its hardened patrons were not prepared for...

A week or so later, a phone call to Palm Springs from Merrick confirmed that there were limits to what Bacharach could control in a live production, eight times a week. “He...