Greg Sandow

I had my first musical experience with a bird many years ago, when I was a total city guy. I was frantically orchestrating an opera one December, in my studio apartment in …

Greg Sandow

It’ll be old news by the time you read this, but it’s worth revisiting: The Pulitzer Prize for Music has changed its guidelines. This was all over the press when it happened back …

Greg Sandow

In the past few weeks, I’ve gone to a scattering of new music concerts in New York where I live, and I’ve noticed that there doesn’t seem to be any consistent audience. People …

Greg Sandow

We were on the bus, my wife and I, coming downtown from Lincoln Center, when we overheard two people talking about something they’d just seen. The best performance in 30 years, they …

Greg Sandow

Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time—as we’ve now learned to call his novel, whose name used to be rendered as Remembrance of Things Past—is very long, published in seven separate …

Greg Sandow

If you go to Apple’s site for GarageBand, the company’s new and wildly hyped music software, you’d think you’d encountered a revolution. All of us—without even a speck of musical …

Greg Sandow

Well, maybe not the world, but—just maybe—classical music. By “we” I mean all of us active in new music. And I know I’ve written before, either in a column here or in …

Greg Sandow

I learned atonal music because I had to.

But don’t worry—I’m not going to write another “composer forced to write atonal music” piece. I wanted to …

Greg Sandow

Nick Hornby‘s Songbook is the most satisfying book on music I’ve read in a long time. Hornby has an advantage, of course, over …

Greg Sandow

We might wish that music spoke for itself, and that we didn’t need special genre names to identify it. But that’s not how the world works. You ask someone what …