In this episode, Jay begins with a shout—“Carolina Shout,” the classic jazz number by James P. Johnson. There are songs by ...

During the high dudgeon of the Black Lives Matter movement, New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts joined the chorus of handwringers with a particular twist. “In our 60+ year history, we ...

For a few days, it was raining Martinů—Bohuslav Martinů, the Czech composer who lived from 1890 to 1959. I am exaggerating. But we did have two Martinů pieces in close succession, which is rare. The ...

Rob Henderson’s new memoir, Troubled, describes his journey from foster care in rural California to military service in the U.S. Air Force to public intellectual. With degrees from Yale and Cambridge ...

Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) was one of the most admired, desired, and envied European artists of her day. She now holds a more subtle role in the history of art. Compared to female artists such as ...

Many people, if they wonder how music is made up, suppose that it consists of a tune and an accompaniment. The paradigmatic guitarist in front of a campfire croons the melody, while his hands create ...

You don’t even exist!” Characters in Russian fiction are always insulting each other in this way. They call each other zeroes, nothings, nonentities. The hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground ...

Ever since I read Alan Jefferson’s Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (1996), the first and, after three decades, still the only biography of that impeccable vocal artist who for me and so many remains the ...

The long shadow cast by the poetry of the Great War is a critic’s staple. Less obviously apparent, perhaps, are some of its implications—both for the literature of the immediate post-war era and, ...

The 1960s and 1970s resonate in our collective memory as a time of upheaval and social change, both in the United States and abroad—decades marked by the struggles of the civil-rights movement, the ...

T he story goes that in 1923 Marcel Duchamp finally abandoned his “hilarious picture” of psychosexually contorted glass and wire, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, to spend more time ...

The remarkable An Ordinary Youth (now available for the first time in English in a translation by Michael Lipkin), an autobiographical novel by Walter Kempowski (1929 ...