Greg Sandow

A while ago I annoyed some readers by comparing atonal music to abstract art. I’d thought that the comparison was a cliché in conversations about 20th-century culture, but the readers I annoyed …

Greg Sandow

One night about a year ago, Donal Fox sat down at the piano in Merkin Hall and began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This was the start of “Transformations, Variations, Improvisations,” a …

Greg Sandow

In the wake of our disaster, I want to ask why music moves us so much. “Music is the nutrition of the soul,” I heard Zarin Mehta say about a week after …

Greg Sandow

I was deeply moved when I heard the premiere of Ingram Marshall‘s Kingdom Come, played by the American Composers Orchestra in 1997, and I wasn’t alone. The piece got an ovation. I …

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Greg SandowPhoto by Melissa Richard

It was such a New York night.
There we were, “we” being an audience of several hundred, in the shadow, the valley, or, better, the notch between the two twin …

Thoughts on composing operas.

Greg SandowPhoto by Melissa Richard

I
For a long time, I’ve found Pierre Boulez’s music pretty. Not his earliest works, his Sonatine for flute and piano, his hard-edged first two piano sonatas, or his startling, …