Prior to the rise of urban culture, the sounds of clucking hens must have been among the world’s most ubiquitous annoyances. For millennia, humans have been “up with the chickens,”…

I was electrified by Jonathan Berger’s music before I knew he wrote about music. His chamber works arise out of a lightning storm of modernist angles, dramatic and startling, though…

If there really is a music of the spheres, the sound of a fundamental harmony in the universe, it has to be Just Ancient Loops, a 2012 work by composer Michael Harrison. Played on…

On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. I was trying to get my computer to write music on its own. I wanted to…

During the last months of my mother’s life, as she ventured further from lucidity, she was visited by music. In collusion with her dementia, her hearing loss filled her consciousness…

The scientific debate over genius usually boils down to the question, “Does brilliance spring from lucky genes or 10,000 hours of gritty study?” To judge from a relatively recent…

Vijay Iyer doesn’t like the term “genius” and the jazz pianist is on a roll explaining why. “The ‘G word’ is often used to shut down conversation or inquiry into a particular…

One evening, some 40 years ago, I got lost in time. I was at a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major. During the second movement I had the unnerving feeling that time…