Tag: Alex Ross

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ENGL 397: Capturing Music at Rice

I’m teaching a course this semester on music, writing, and culture in Houston, sponsored by the wonderful Humanities Research Center here at Rice University. After four concerts and five excellent guest speakers, the course culminated with a visit from The New Yorker’s Alex Ross last week. You can read about it on the English department website if you like, but in summary, it was a brilliant visit full of Catherisms, Wagnerisms and other favorite things.

And for the last concert of the semester, Ars Lyrica’s “Italian Sirens,” my students competed in a writing competition hosted by ALH. You can read the winning piece on ALH’s website.

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Houston World Premieres of Note

…at Lone Star Lyric Festival, which runs through June 25. Classical music is funny about supporting new work and living composers, as the sage Alex Ross wrote about this very week regarding the Metropolitan Opera’s new appointment of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the NY Philharmonic’s Jaap van Zweden. Looking around at companies not only in Houston, but in America, LSL looks very forward-looking to me. Read my review at Houstonia Magazine.

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Summer Intermission: Some Notes

As the summer opera-hiatus drags on—alas, will October never arrive?—a few notes:

Opera is not far away! Alex Waterman directs the late Robert Ashley’s Vidas Perfectas over two weekends in west Texas. Vidas Perfectas is a Spanish iteration of Ashley’s seven-episode television opera Perfect Lives that premiered in the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York this spring. It is perhaps his best-known work—a composition that pushes feverishly against traditional and stuffy attitudes about opera to focus on the American vernacular and, most of all, American storytelling. Catch the first four episodes in El Paso on July 12 and the final three in Ciudad Juárez on July 13. The tour moves to Marfa for another two performances on July 18 and 19 (for more info, check out Ballroom Marfa). I’m catching the last night—look out for a review—and you can also watch video recordings of all the episodes (previously filmed in February) here.

The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones writes a noteworthy spotlight piece on Brian Eno—a composer who continues to thrill and bewilder my notions of musical content. And, surprisingly, Alex Ross takes a more generous approach than some Houston critics (myself included) to Weinberg’s The Passenger, which came through Houston in January and now sees its way through New York.