Twelve photographs from the northeastern sertão of Brazil — Paraíba and Pernambuco, 2018. Taken by documentary filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley during a journey in search of the region's living musical traditions: forró, birimbau, cavaquinho, samba de roda. A meditation on the gaze, the road, and the faces that stay with you long after the names are gone.

Review: Andante: Los pasos de un músico. Vida y obra de Alberto Soriano. By Mireya Soriano Editorial Milenio. Spain, 2021.

Aged beef. Kimchi. Gnocchi with chitterlings. The menu at Urondo Bar does not court trends, nor does it apologize for its stubbornness. It simply is — rooted, specific, unapologetically itself. And that, it turns out, is a political act.

The Lakota Music Project — a collaboration between the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and Lakota and Dakota musicians that is unlike anything else in American cultural life. This is not a guest-spot model, where an indigenous artist appears on stage for a movement and then disappears.

The evening was organized around the idea of America — its founding ideals, its contradictions, its music — and it unfolded with the kind of architectural clarity that only a conductor of long experience can bring to a program. Slon has spent a quarter century building something at UVA that is difficult to name and easy to feel: a choral culture in which students sing not just with technical accomplishment but with genuine understanding of what the music means and where it co

Douglas Shadle’s recent essay in the New York Times, “It Wasn’t Easy Being a Founding Father of the American Symphony,” presents itself as an act of historical recovery. But the logic of the argument does not hold. And once you begin to trace where it fails, a different picture emerges — one in which the desire to find American origins has led to a fundamental misreading of who Bristow was and what his work actually represents.

Fanny: A Fantasy in G, Tim McGillicuddy’s new play presented by Off-Brand Opera at the Gural Theatre at A.R.T./New York, tells the story of Fanny Mendelssohn — composer, woman, Jew, sister of Felix — and her lifelong struggle to claim her voice in a world not yet prepared to welcome it. McGillicuddy neither sensationalizes nor reaches for false modern parallels. He simply shows what happened, in a parlor, at a piano, over the course of a life. That discipline is the play’s gr

There is a room in the Hispanic Society of America, a museum so quietly extraordinary that even most New Yorkers have never set foot in it — where the walls tell a different story of Spain. Fourteen monumental canvases, each between twelve and fourteen feet tall, wrapping around you for nearly two hundred and thirty feet of painted Spain.

The documentary filmmaker patiently waited for months until the fog of the Epstein's files dissipated to grab an opportunity to seat next to Leon Botstein to discuss what matters to his film on George Bristow. Now, al last, Leon Botstein perspective is part of Live and Music in the Age of Bristow, Montes-Bradley's documentary on 19th Century Music in America.

I intended to make a biography. The working title was simply George Bristow, and the plan was straightforward: rescue a forgotten American composer from the obscurity into which history had carelessly dropped him, and let audiences discover what they had been missing.

Of Thee I Sing traces the country's musical identity through the instruments that shaped it — from Native American traditions and the colonial period through the waves of immigrant innovation that defined the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

That stroke Paul Mescal cuts through the water with in Hamnet has a remarkable history. It traces back to Buenos Aires, where a young English boy first watched local children swim with an overarm technique in the 1860s — knowledge that would eventually cross the Pacific and become the modern freestyle. One of the most quietly powerful moments in an Oscar-worthy performance, carrying centuries of borrowed, forgotten expertise.

In Tango After Midnight: Music, Vice, and Memory in Buenos Aires and New York, I reflect on growing up near the legendary tango club Caño 14 and draw unexpected parallels with nineteenth-century New York. From smoky tango dives in Buenos Aires to the saloons and dance halls of the Lower East Side, music after midnight shaped cultural identity in both cities. Classically trained musicians moved between elite institutions and shadowy nightlife, blurring the boundaries between h