Search Results for: The Classical

Bringing Bach to the Public

Jessica Gross | Longreads | June 2016 | 15 minutes (3,866 words)

 

In December, I stayed in New York City while its residents flew away and visitors flooded the streets. I treated the quiet time like a vacation, searching for little adventures. On a Tuesday shortly before Christmas, this little Jew put on her most respectable NYC-adventuress outfit—a green-and-gray-plaid skirt, black heeled ankle boots—and went to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.

Several days prior, scouring the detailed schedule of the (insanely beautiful) Cathedral, I’d seen a mysterious listing for a Bach pop-up concert. I knew little about what I was headed to, and hadn’t seen this concert advertised anywhere. When I showed up, only a smattering of people filled the seats in the grand cavernous space.

It is hard to describe a completely transporting musical experience; all the most accurate words feel cheesy. But here it is: this experience was transcendent. The woman playing Bach on her violin created a trance in which we were all held captive. It felt ludicrous that there were not more people there to witness it. When the performance ended, I blinked and smacked my hands together, wanting more.

She announced she’d be playing again shortly, at the Hungarian Pastry Shop across the street, so I dutifully followed. It was a different space—crowded with patrons, small, the sound loud and close. But I was entranced yet again. I beamed a gaping smile at the strangers around me, less cool adventuress than extremely uncool sycophant, but I couldn’t help it: this was pretty euphoric.

Afterward, I introduced myself to the musician. Her name was Michelle Ross, and it turned out this was the culmination of “Discovering Bach,” her 33-day project playing Bach’s entire solo violin cycle in public spaces throughout New York City. She kept a blog throughout, but hadn’t promoted the series anywhere; she wanted to create an authentic communal experience, not do a publicity stunt. Ross is young and extremely accomplished: she spent over a decade training with the  legendary Itzhak Perlman, has played on famous stages all over the world, curates a classical music festival in Utah, and even composes her own music. We met up a couple of months after her mesmerizing performance to discuss “Discovering Bach” and what it means to perform classical music in a public space, to let it be raw. Read more…

Graduation Day: Five Stories About Commencement

This is a picture of me and my great friend Shannon on our graduation day in 2012. She is my first and last; that is, we were roommates our freshman year and our senior year. There are many things I don’t miss about my four years in higher ed, but living amongst my closest friends isn’t one of them. If I could go back to any moment in my life, I think I would choose walking into the student union and seeing a table of my friends, laughing and working.

College was brutal. I almost didn’t finish. My friends gave meaning to my pain. If that sounds dramatic, that’s because it was. College is nothing if not dramatic, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. For four years, my universe was a bucolic, neoclassical (and neoconservative) postage stamp in a part of the country I didn’t know existed until I moved there. Commencement was a blur, with a dull speaker and many, many photos. I wanted to sleep for a month and forget about the angst of my final semester. Read more…

Can an Outsider Ever Truly Become Amish?

Two sisters in their traditional, everyday, Lancaster County Amish attire. Photo: Tessa Smucker

Kelsey Osgood | Atlas Obscura | March 2016 | 28 minutes (7,014 words)

 

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Kelsey Osgood, and is co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

Author’s Note: “Alex” and “Rebecca” are not the real names of two people interviewed. They felt strongly that they should not be identified by name out of respect for their faith’s general belief in the body above the individual.

The road that runs through the main village of Berlin, Ohio, only about 90 minutes south of Cleveland, is called “Amish Country Byway” for its unusual number of non-automotive travelers and it’s true that driving down it, you’ll have to slow down for the horse-drawn buggies that clog up the right lane. But those seeking the “real” Amish experience in downtown Berlin might be disappointed. It’s more Disney than devout: a playground for tourists full of ersatz Amish “schnuck” (Pennsylvania Dutch for “cute”) stores selling woven baskets and postcards of bucolic farm scenes.

You only see the true Holmes County, which is home to the largest population of Amish-Mennonites in the world, when you turn off Route 62 and venture into the rolling green hills interrupted periodically by tiny towns with names like Charm and Big Prairie. You’ll likely lose service on your cell phone just as the manure smell starts to permeate the air. On my visit this past summer, I saw Amish people–groups of children sporting round straw hats, the young women in their distinctive long dresses–spilling out of family barns, where church services are held, in the distance. The Amish don’t have any spiritual attachment to a geographical location, the way Jews have to Jerusalem or Mormons to Salt Lake City; this spot, along with Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is probably the closest they come to an idea of God’s Country. Read more…

Violet

Illustration by: Kjell Reigstad

Adele Oliveira | Longreads | January 2016 | 23 minutes (5,727 words)

 

I don’t believe in fate, or that life events, both everyday and profound, unfold the way that they’re supposed to. Yet the first six months of my first pregnancy were at once mundane and ordained. I got pregnant quickly. Morning sickness and a sore back arrived right on schedule. Growing up, my mom acquainted me with the details (like gaining 60 pounds) of her two healthy pregnancies and the unmedicated, uncomplicated births that resulted in me and my sister. I’d wanted to be a mother since I was a toddler pretending to breastfeed my dolls, and so I outlined the birth of a healthy child in an indelible mental framework, so unconscious and routine that it felt like destiny.

My pregnancy ended abruptly when our daughter Violet was born two years ago in late September, at 25 weeks gestation, about three months ahead of schedule. The day of Violet’s birth feels like a bad dream, partly because I was on a variety of strong drugs. I remember almost all of it with nauseating specificity, but it still doesn’t seem quite real; like it happened to somebody else.  Read more…

The Machiavelli of Maryland

Longreads Pick

A fascinating profile of Edward Luttwak—military strategist, classical scholar, cattle rancher, and an adviser to presidents, prime ministers, and the Dalai Lama.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Dec 9, 2015
Length: 28 minutes (7,000 words)

Ten Years After Juilliard

In 2004, Daniel J. Wakin of The New York Times tracked down the instrumentalists of Juilliard’s 1994 graduating class, whose members were by then in their 30s and “mostly embarked on careers and family life.” Though now over a decade old, “The Juilliard Effect: Ten Years Later” stands as a compelling look at the difficulties of making a living in classical music after training at one of the world’s most prestigious conservatories:

The results suggest how hard it can be to live as a classical musician in a society that seems increasingly to be pushing classical music to the margins, even as Juilliard and scores of other music schools pour out batches of performers year after year. Orchestras and chamber ensembles are under increasing financial pressure as subscriptions have dropped and government arts financing has dried up, the recording industry has shrunk and the median age of classical audiences is not getting any younger.

Sometimes the struggle is just too much, and many drop out, perhaps disillusioned with a once-sacred endeavor that has come to seem a cold, unforgiving trade. Others, like Mr. Alexander, are simply sick of the financial grind: the low pay, the lack of benefits, the scramble for work. But many others make it, and what also came clear from the analysis of this class were the high levels of dedication many of the graduates maintain and the satisfactions and excitement of expressing oneself through one of the purest forms of communication: the making of music.

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Looking for Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles

Hollywood, 1923. Photo: Library of Congress

Judith Freeman | Pantheon Books | December 2007 | 38 minutes (9603 words)

Judith Freeman traces Raymond Chandler’s early days in Los Angeles and his introduction to Cissy Pascal, the much older, very beautiful woman who would later become his wife.  This chapter is excerpted from Freeman’s 2007 book The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, which Janet Fitch described as “part biography, part detective story, part love story, and part séance.” Freeman’s next book—a memoir called The Latter Days—will be published by Pantheon in June 2016.

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‘The Good Is Elusive and Transitory in This World’

Photo: Courtesy Maira Kalman

Jessica Gross | Longreads | November 2015 | 19 minutes (4,880 words)

 

Few things remind me of how much beauty there is in the world as clearly and reliably as Maira Kalman’s work. An author, artist and designer, Kalman has written and illustrated dozens of books for children and adults, including The Principles of Uncertainty and And the Pursuit of Happiness, both originally columns for The New York Times; done sketchbooks and covers for The New Yorker; curated museum exhibits; illustrated Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Michael Pollan’s Food Rules—I could go on indefinitely. What unites her work is not only her aesthetic style—vibrant paintings, overlaid with whimsical lettering, usually involving a large dose of quirk and whimsy—but her determined discovery of what it means to be alive. Kalman’s work often begins with the reportorial, and she has a keen eye for minute, but transporting, details. In transferring what she sees to the page, she affords the reader entrée into her sense of wonder and studied optimism—and into the deepest existential questions there are.

I would have grabbed at almost any excuse to interview Kalman, but it just so happened that she was about to publish a book on one of my favorite subjects: dogs. When her husband, the graphic designer Tibor Kalman, passed away at 49, Kalman—who until then had been terrified of dogs—got an Irish Wheaton named Pete. It was an abrupt about-face, and nominally for the children; to her surprise, Kalman fell in love. In Beloved Dog, she presents a compilation of her pieces featuring dogs: a whole lot of them, it turns out. Read more…

Loving Books in a Dark Age

The Venerable Bede, image via Wikimedia Commons

Michael Pye | The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe | Pegasus Books | April 2015 | 31 minutes (8,498 words)

 

Below is a chapter excerpted from The Edge of the World, by Michael Pye, as recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky

 

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There was nobody else alive, nobody who could read or preach or sing the service, except the abbot, Ceolfrith, and one bright boy: who was local, well-connected and about sixteen, and whose name was unusual. He was called Bede, and he wasn’t called ‘saint’ or ‘venerable’, not yet. Read more…

Travel, Foreignness, and the Spaces in Between: A Pico Iyer Reading List

Pico Iyer’s travel writing — whether he’s describing a long walk in Kyoto, a jetlag-fueled airport layover, or a quiet moment in a monastery — captures not just the physicality of places, but also the spaces within and between them.

In his essay “Why We Travel,” Iyer writes that he has been a traveler since birth: born in Oxford to parents from India, schooled in England and the United States, then living in Japan since 1992 (with annual trips to California). These seven reads reveal Iyer as a perpetual wanderer of both place and time: navigating spaces in flux or forgotten, meditating on finding one’s place in an ever-shifting world, and, as part of this journey, exploring that which is deep within us. Read more…