by Matthew Friedman | Mar 28, 2026 | Music
I was sitting on my couch some years ago, listening with my eyes closed to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The stereo was turned up just a bit too loud for the neighbours, I think, but I could feel the low strings and the tympani resonate through my body like a...
by Matthew Friedman | Feb 25, 2026 | Music
In 1937 John Cage enunciated his credo on the future of music. “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise,” he wrote. “When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 m.p.h. Static...
by Matthew Friedman | Feb 20, 2026 | Music
I came to avant-garde art music fairly early (and fairly easily), through the soundtrack album for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and my friendship with Robert Kermode. Robert had similarly obscure interests, and we played a game of trying to find the most...
by Matthew Friedman | Dec 28, 2025 | Essays, Music
Outrage flooded into the aisles of the Théâtre des Champs Elysées on the night of 29 May 1913, and spilled into the streets of Paris’s 8e Arrondissement. The premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps, a new ballet staged by Sergei Diaghilev’s Les Ballets Russes,...
by Matthew Friedman | Jan 27, 2023 | Essays, Jewish Life, Music
At the end Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis, Kaiser Uberall accepts his fate: he will be sacrificed to restore the balance of life and death that his own arrogance and brutality so tragically upset. It is one of the most powerful moments in 20th century...