Subscribe

Chasing Sorolla’s Light follows a detour from Madrid to Valencia after the Museo Sorolla closes for renovations. Visiting Fundación Bancaja, Eduardo Montes-Bradley traces Joaquín Sorolla’s evolution—from Mediterranean seascapes and garden paintings to the Vision of Spain murals—while gathering documentary notes on light, identity, and archival process for a future film.

Eight months chasing George Frederick Bristow taught me: American music wasn't forged—it's molded clay, shaped by many hands. Bristow brought European order: symphonies, hymns. Gottschalk added New Orleans fire: habanera, Congo Square echoes. Amid Civil War scars, westward expansion, Native voices silenced or absorbed, and immigrant tunes flooding in—no one won. The clay just kept every fingerprint. My film, nearly done, isn't only Bristow's story. It's the restless 19th cent

A reflection on William Kinderman’s illuminating talk at the Barnes Foundation, exploring Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony not as a triumphant monument, but as a fragile process of searching—where joy emerges slowly, through doubt, revision, and an upward gaze toward something larger than ourselves.

A reflection on Werner Herzog’s belief in human instinct and survival, inspired by a conversation with Conan O’Brien. From generational anxiety to the digital wilderness, this essay explores whether humanity is learning—slowly and imperfectly—to navigate an invisible forest of its own making.

An exploratory research project in Cuba focused on identifying and analyzing stained-glass works connected to Tiffany Studios and artists associated with Louis Comfort Tiffany, in collaboration with conservator Mirell Vázquez Montero.

Discover the revival of George Frederick Bristow's Symphony No. 5 "Niagara" at Carnegie Hall in January 2026 by the American Symphony Orchestra. Explore this forgotten American composer's legacy in forging a national musical identity.

Written late at night, this essay reflects on exile not as loss, but as discipline. Moving between Buenos Aires in 1978, Virgil’s Aeneas, and a life shaped by documentation rather than nostalgia, Eduardo Montes-Bradley considers survival, forward motion, and the obligations we carry—not because we are asked to, but because we choose to.

I grew up hearing it every December, and it always blended into the holiday noise. But this year, it's hitting differently. Maybe because I'm paying attention. Maybe because the song is just absurd enough to demand it.

When we talk about George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1778–1860) we tend to leap from one dazzling highlight to another: the child prodigy who, at age ten, performed a Viotti concerto in Paris before an audience that included Thomas Jefferson, to the electrifying 1803 Vienna premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major, Op. 47—the fiery work later rededicated as the “Kreutzer” Sonata after the famous falling-out between the two musicians.

And then, in William Hill’s New York there are the specifics. My favorite: the Daguerreian Gallery of Illustrious Americans, located at 205 Broadway, already present in the city by the mid-1840s. Its inclusion is not incidental. It places this image at the threshold between older forms of representation and the emerging modern world of mechanical reproduction.

As America strove to forge identity through music, literature, painting, and the arts more broadly, a remarkable innovation was quietly reshaping the musical landscape. It was precisely in this context that the piano, transformed by the invention of the iron frame by Bostonian piano maker Alpheus Babcock, entered the scene.

One of the guiding principles behind George Frederick Bristow: American Composer has been to understand not only Bristow himself, but the musical world he inherited. This short sequence from the film, featuring composer and scholar Neely Bruce, helps illuminate that earlier soundscape with remarkable clarity.

The Augarten was not merely a picturesque garden. Established as a public park in 1775 by Emperor Joseph II, it was one of the first civic green spaces in Europe. At its entrance, an inscription still proclaims it a place “Allen Menschen gewidmeter Erlustigungs-Ort von ihrem Schätzer.” The translation is eloquent: Place of recreation dedicated to all people by their admirer.

Those vast canvases—painted by artists paid to glorify emperors and battles—have now become our raw material. They are documents, not simply works of art. They are the visual record that allows us to animate history, to give shape to events, to place our subjects in a world that would otherwise exist only in text and memory.

William Montes-Liendo — who prefers simply Montes — touched down in London early this morning. Safe, exhilarated, and already filming. Within hours of arrival he began sending the first dailies: quick, spontaneous impressions of the city as he made his way toward what may be the smallest shared room ever conceived for human habitation — a micro-mini-tiny-infinitesimal capsule populated by fellow nomads from every corner of the planet.

A 25-year-old immigrant who started out chasing a woman who only wanted Chuck Norris somehow ended up ringside for film history—Golan yelling in half-Hebrew, half-English, Jon Voight quoting poetry between takes, Konchalovsky fresh from the Soviet Union directing an American action classic.

The short film I am sharing here is nothing more than a quick study—a montage of luminosity and shadow, a meditation on Sorolla’s way of sculpting daylight, a hint of guitar strings reverberating behind images that refuse to sit still. It is a first step, a way of preparing the eye before standing in front of the original canvases.

Workflow is changing. Production models are changing. The way we capture, process, and share images is changing. And the audience — students, scholars, the public — is consuming information faster, with greater intensity, and through tools that barely existed a few years ago. In the middle of this shifting landscape, I asked ChatGPT an opinion...