is that the crying and the shooting might as well be contemporaneous. This is because, while in individual cases those accused of shooting and crying might have been expressing genuine moral contrition… collectively, a certain kind of crying enables rather than curbs moral disaster. This is the kind of crying that is calibrated to express regret not for what one has done and should not have done so much as for what one, regrettably, had to do… [T]he professed “moral injury” to self turns the perpetrator into a victim (cf. “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society”). The problem with shooting and crying is that all too often you are not really crying for anyone but yourself.

(emphasis mine)

I want to print this out and put it on my wall, to scream it from the rooftop, to tattoo these words on my forehead. And when someone tells me that they know how awful Spotify is, but that they just can’t part with the playlists they worked so hard to create, or that they can’t afford to buy all the music they love, I want to say, “fine—but please acknowledge that you are shooting and crying.” Or perhaps, I should say, streaming and crying.

There are, no doubt, ways in which it is difficult to “live ethically in an unethical society.” When it comes to shooting and crying, I am as guilty as the next. My job “requires” me to fly constantly, and I lament my complicity in the tons of CO² spewed into the atmosphere of our gasping planet. In other areas, I have opted out of engaging with problematic firms—I don’t, for example, shop at Amazon—but for rural Americans faced with the decline of small-town retail, the company serves as a lifeline for basic goods.

Yet the phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” breaks down completely in the realm of music. What prevents consumers from paying musicians for their labor is not the capture of the industry by dirty money, but rather, sheer entitlement: that is, the belief that frictionless access to all music at all times is a right. Last year, I argued against streaming, not from an economic standpoint but from the viewpoint that choice paralysis—access to a library containing hundreds of millions of songs—leads many of us to become lousy listeners. Here, I want to make not merely an economic argument, but a moral one: if you claim the mantle of pro-labor politics while continuing to stream music, your commitment to those values is not worth the DSA patch on your backpack. You are, instead, shooting and crying.

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Consider this: you would not parade through the restaurant district of your city, gliding through the door of a quaint family-owned trattoria, taking a few bites of pasta, running your finger through a slick of whipped ricotta, licking a plate of octopus, and leaving a few pennies on the table before moving onto the French bistro down the block, where you might allow a few oysters to slip down your gullet (to be washed down with a nice Muscadet; another coin or two left on the counter), and then onto the Tibetan momo joint around the corner, and so on.

For any number of reasons, you would never do this. First of all, we don’t expect to dine lavishly for pennies. We know the kitchen staff is back there, trimming vegetables, peeling garlic, washing dishes, plating pork chops. Surely we understand that paying $0.0035 per bite would not come close to covering the restaurant’s labor costs. And then there’s the fact that we can eat only so much before, like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, a wafer-thin mint might cause us, quite literally, to explode.

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And yet, when it comes to music, millions, daily, do something not unlike what I’ve just described. It is an economic model that has been sanctioned by streaming services and major record labels without the consent of artists. It is technically legal, and patently exploitative. When streamers protest that they “cannot afford to purchase all the music they listen to,” they are acknowledging that concern for the fair compensation of artists has been supplanted by the societal norm of constant, passive listening. But you, the listener, may choose to protest this state of affairs, one in which music, through its increasing ubiquity, is at once degraded and devalued.

Just how devalued is music? Let us begin by asking what it costs to make an album today. Budgets vary wildly, but for the sake of argument, let’s take a conservative (i.e. medium-low) estimate.1 What follows is a hypothetical budget for a singer-songwriter, with day-rates set somewhat lower than what one might find in New York or Los Angeles, but which would likely be appropriate elsewhere. My point here is to demonstrate that even for albums made thriftily, streaming royalties are akin to wage theft.

Now, if the average streaming royalty comes out to roughly $0.0035 per stream,2 then a self-releasing artist would need around 11 million streams—or 1 million plays of the complete album (presuming 10-11 songs)—to break even on that $38,800 budget. And that’s before she’s able to per herself a dime. By contrast, if the sale of a single album nets roughly $9,3 she would need to sell 4,300 records to break even. By this measure, each sale is equivalent to roughly 230 streams of the entire album. The question I would ask is this: can you point me to an album you’ve listened to 230 times, start to finish? Probably not. But let's say you’ve listened to your favorite record 50—or even 100—times. That still suggests that an artist whose songs mean so much to you is, at best, receiving 25-50% of what they would have been paid had you purchased their album. The more casual the listening, the more dismal the numbers: listening to a record front-to-back ten times might result in 5% of the pay an artist would have received from a single sale. (This isn’t actually how streaming royalties are dispersed; the reality suggests an even grimmer picture.)4

In sum, streaming has not merely redirected revenue from one format to another. It has led, rather, to lower levels of artist compensation while exacerbating inequality between megastars and everyone else. Even as those at the very top draw eye-popping streaming royalties, most artists make less than they did in the pre-streaming era. This state of affairs stems simultaneously from the formula by which streaming services pay out royalties, which rewards on-repeat, passive listening; the dominance of opaquely curated playlists, which artificially boost streams; and the influence of the three major record labels, which, in some instances, hold equity stakes in streaming services, and whose power to shape algorithms and playlists remains shrouded in secrecy. Taken together, these factors suggest a twisted landscape in which a three-minute song streamed fifteen times in a row is deemed more valuable than a forty-five-minute symphony listened to once.

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Admittedly, the headwinds are strong, and streaming isn’t going anywhere. For many, the album itself is a thing of the past; artists like me are increasingly cobwebbed relics of a bygone era. So yes, if you are a happy capitalist, by all means, stream away! But for those who are troubled by inequality, who believe in worker power, and would have their lifestyle better reflect their values, music is an area in which it is entirely possible to limit one’s consumption to reflect the labor required to produce albums.

I stopped streaming a little more than a year ago. I detailed the evolution of my listening habits over the course of three essays, which you can explore here, here, and here. For those interested in reforming their own relationship to recorded music, I suggest allocating a manageable monthly budget, and putting in quality time with each of a handful of titles that you purchase; Bandcamp and/or the merch table remain the most artist-friendly means of doing so. If your experience is anything like mine, you may find that the quality of your listening, and the relationships that you develop to individual albums, will deepen and improve. Beyond that, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that your money is going directly to artists you admire.

The issue isn’t that writers like Caramanica champion Taylor Swift or Young Thug, but that they have become almost exclusively reactive. In an earlier era, NYC pop music critics—love them or hate them—spent many of their nights in sweaty clubs, taking the pulse of fledgling scenes, writing capsule reviews of shows and albums for The Times, The Village Voice or any number of other outlets. Think of John Rockwell reviewing the first Sonic Youth album in 1982 (skeptical), or Robert Christgau writing up a Patti Smith show at CBGB in early 1975 (enthusiastic). In those days, the hyperlocal focus of New York-based critics made those writers—and, by extension, those outlets—national tastemakers. (I made a similar argument in a 2025 essay for The Atlantic.)

By contrast, today’s sorry excuse for a music criticism apparatus—in which clicks are dollars and an increasing number of news outlets are owned by vulture capitalists—has led those same outlets to do an about-face: rather than championing something new and homegrown, they wait for algorithms, digital marketing firms, and what remains of the major label machine, to do the anointing. At that point—chasing clicks and ad dollars—they simply bestow the imprimatur of the NYT on what is already popular, rendering the Times (and, I would add, The New Yorker) irrelevant.

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None of this is to suggest that those who sounded off about the Times’ list were firing without merit. On the contrary, their arguments, often rooted in the age-old tension between craft and zeitgeist, point toward a palpable decline in the analytical arsenal of today’s music writers. Gone are the days when pop music critics—like John Rockwell, who could review a David Bowie gig and a Mahler symphony in the same week—had enough musical knowledge to assess both sides of that equation. As a result, there’s an entire aesthetic universe—call it “art music built from the vernacular,” or vice versa—one concerned more with musical architecture than with “vibes,” that is written off in toto by the Jon Caramanicas and Lindsay Zoladzes of the world. It is within this paradigm that someone like Randy Newman, who, for my money, is the living heir to the Great American Songbook tradition, could be left off The List.

To be sure, craft, itself, is a highly subjective construct; the ways in which we define craft are, themselves, a form of gatekeeping. Unimpeachable counterpoint and sophisticated chord progressions are not prerequisites for good pop music, but neither should they be disqualifying. Moreover, a critical praxis predicated on stream counts and TikTok virality is exclusionary in ways that surrender human agency and ingenuity to the insatiable maw of capital.

It also begs the question: what is pop music criticism for? The poptimist movement began as a corrective to a critical discourse which too often neglected women and people of color. Poptimism argued that white male critics lavished attention on white male artists to the exclusion of (non-white male) performers who had broad followings, but who were perceived, by dint of their pop aesthetics, as being less serious or sophisticated, and thus less worthy of critical ink. Poptimists took it as axiomatic that what is popular is good and that it therefore deserved to be written about.

Twenty years after the publication of Kelefa Sanneh’s landmark essay, “The Rap Against Rockism,” which, in popularizing the concept of poptimism in the United States, signaled a shift in coverage of popular music, the poptimists’ conquest is complete. But if the movement initially sought to lift up marginalized voices, it now serves, depressingly, to reinforce a culture dominated by algorithms and stream counts.

I have a number of friends who, understandably incensed by this state of affairs, expend a great deal of emotional energy being pissed off at Taylor Swift and the people who love her. But as I age, I just don’t have the energy to get exercised about the monoculture. I try to use my modest platform to lift up music I care about, and am grateful when others do the same. At the end of the day, what matters most to me is nurturing community, which, as I see it, is the only way out of our political hellscape.

In chasing national trends, the critics of the New York Times have forsaken their duty to animate and articulate, through their coverage, a community of artists. Some time ago, the paper shifted its focus—for ostensibly existential financial reasons—away from being a local paper and toward an identity as a national/international outlet. That’s all well and good, but it leaves a gaping hole in the ecology of the arts.

For my money, the “Greatest Living Songwriters” list was dumb clickbait which omitted an entire pantheon of irreplaceably brilliant songwriters. But the thing I most lament is the loss of a critical landscape in which you could open up the paper each morning and read six reviews of weird shows on the Lower East Side. Back then, critics were in the trenches seeking not only to discover the next big thing, but also to connect the dots between artists and micro cultures, rather than regurgitating, in greyish prose, the outputs of the Spotify algorithm.

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My new album, Elevator Songs, a collaboration with Roomful of Teeth, is out now. You can listen & purchase here. My tour dates are here. As always, thank you for reading, and to those with paid subscriptions, for making this publication possible. If you’re not in a position to upgrade, please consider liking, sharing, or commenting on this post, which will help it become visible to others.

November 26, 1940 - Los Angeles

How memories can torture us, memories we thought we had long forgotten… They are more painful than the real events ever were, because our world of thought is so strongly influenced by our fantasy.

Hannelore Schaefer, unpublished diary

At the age of twelve, I traveled to Ludwigshafen, Germany, to sing in Houston Grand Opera’s 1994 revival of Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes’ Street Scene, which had first appeared on Broadway in 1947. For this production, a dozen children—army brats from the U.S. military base in nearby Heidelberg—were brought in to fill out the sprawling cast of characters who populate the operetta’s grimy Lower East Side setting. But the part of Willie Maurrant, a brawling street kid whose machismo conceals a soft center, required someone with more experience, and I’d sung the role a few years earlier. The catch: I would need a chaperone. In the event, my paternal grandmother, Hannelore, volunteered for the gig.

My grandfather had recently died (it was not an easy marriage), and Lore, as she was known to us, was up for an adventure. We flew into Frankfurt, then took a train to Ludwigshafen, a quaint city whose cobblestoned streets were wreathed with decorative lights. My memories from our month abroad are hazy, but a few images remain indelible: silver platters of rich German food, brought to me by my grandmother while I quarantined in a fusty hotel room with a case of chicken pox (a week of rehearsal lost). On a given night, there would be bratwurst and thick slices of roast beef; potatoes variously scalloped, fried, or smashed; the odd green vegetable; a dish of chocolate pudding. Mornings, Lore would sit in the lobby drinking black coffee while penciling her way through the New York Times crossword puzzle. By the time my quarantine had concluded, the crossword had become a ritual she shared with our kindly conductor, a wild-haired Englishman named James Holmes. But my clearest memory from that time is one of omission. I’m almost certain that my grandmother said nothing to me about the significance of our transatlantic sojourn: she had not set foot in Germany since fleeing the Nazi regime in 1939, aged seventeen.

The Houston Grand Opera production of Street Scene was among the first to be captured in high-definition for DVD release, and though it’s long been out of print, you can find it on YouTube. Scanning the scenes in which I appear—the most substantial is a schoolyard song and dance culminating in a fistfight—I sought recently to decode my twelve-year-old state of mind. On screen, I see a child who vacillates between self-confidence and spaciness—not much has changed in three decades. (I also note that I’m strategically hidden during the dance sequences, and for good reason.) But there’s no indication—how could there be?—of what I might have thought about my grandmother’s homecoming.

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Until Hitler came to power, Lore lived a typical, if not entirely happy, assimilated German-Jewish existence. Her father, Alfred Schaefer, was a prosperous banker whose first wife had died when their two sons were small. With his second wife, Else, there would be two more children, the first of whom was my grandmother. (Else would live to be ninety-nine; I recall her sitting in a worn Eames lounge chair in the living room of my grandparents’ Los Angeles home, a scowl fixed to her wizened face.) Then came the Third Reich, and institutionalized antisemitism along with it. In short order, my great-grandfather would lose his job, Jews were stripped of citizenship, while Jewish businesses became sites of protest and intimidation.

The day after Kristallnacht, my great-grandfather was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. There, though malnourished, he managed to stay alive. Some two weeks later, he was released. (“What a sight! From the railroad car emerged a horde of the dirtiest, most ragged, starving human beings,” wrote my grandmother.) In the first months of 1939, the family crossed the Atlantic on the S.S. Orinoco, the last ship to make safe passage before the ill-fated journey of the S.S. Saint Louis. They docked in Havana, where, for six months, Lore and her family lived among an enclave of fellow German-Jewish refugees, before emigrating to the United States via New Orleans.

As a child, I knew little of this history. During our stay in Ludwigshafen, as I have said, my grandmother told me nothing about what she felt upon returning to Germany. She was equally tight-lipped over the telephone with my parents, who recall only her comments about the opera’s progress, my tendency to miss entrances, and my habit of mouthing the words of everyone else’s lines. (She seemed more impressed that I had the opera memorized than disappointed in my lack of professionalism.) Where in today’s society, some seek to transform trauma into social capital, my grandmother seemed to want to forget. And yet, I have come to believe, she very much wanted others to remember.

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Years later—I was a junior in college—Lore was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, and was given a year or two to live. Miraculously, she lived another seven years quite happily, until the cancer spread to her brain in early 2010. The last time I saw her, we sat together in the living room of her apartment in a semi-assisted living facility in Santa Rosa, California, ensconced in a canopy of trees. I remember thinking that the abundant sunlight and greenery were a balm, softening the certainty of death; my grandmother at that point had only weeks to live. Against the wall was an imposing desk strewn with papers. At the center sat a candy-colored iMac on which she’d been translating the diaries she’d kept as a teenager. Sitting with my father and uncle, we looked through old photo albums of pre-war Germany, each picture bearing an inscription in looping, silver script. Before we left, I asked Lore if I could email myself the diaries. “Of course, hon,” she said. I walked to my rental car and wept.

A few months after she died, the composer John Adams invited me to write a piece of music for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I decided to compose a memorial for my grandmother, and began poring over the diaries. Reading them, I was struck by the space afforded to the quotidian: accounts of sprained ankles, fights with parents, dates with a high school boyfriend (“under the cover of our coats, we talked to each other with our hands”). And yet, the specter of Nazism announces itself regularly, often woven into accounts of the mundane. On December 16th, 1934, my thirteen-year-old grandmother writes:

Yesterday people stood in front of Jewish stores and agitated and yelled. I am so afraid of everything. [In school] we had to write a French paper. I hope that it came off well. Gerd [her brother] sent me some good stamps.

By 1938, the diaries have taken a distinctly dark turn. Most chilling is her account of the S.S. raid on Groß-Breesen, the agricultural training facility where Lore and her younger brother Rudi had been sent to prepare for emigration. She describes the smashing of windows and grand pianos, axes lodged in tabletops, the boys being corralled by stormtroopers into a barn whose doors were then barricaded shut, the fear that the barn would be set ablaze. Mercifully, no one was harmed, and the siblings returned home, only to find that their father had been sent to Buchenwald.

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Orinoco Sketches, a brief song cycle relating my grandmother’s flight from Germany, premiered in Los Angeles in May of 2011, its libretto inspired by diary entries dating from her transatlantic voyage. (“Sun and ocean, sun and ocean! Life is beautiful… the foam sprays high over the bowsprit... The ocean looks like a giant snow field.”)

Six years later, I returned to the diaries in Book of Travelers, an album and stage piece chronicling an 8,980-mile railway journey I took in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Most of the songs depict passengers I met in Amtrak dining cars, but writing about other people’s intimacies required some vulnerability of my own. Here, then, is “October 1st, 1939/Port of Hamburg,” whose opening lines find my grandmother on a train somewhere in Louisiana:

We are traveling through a flat, beautiful landscape
     writes my grandmother
Ancient forests; trees like bewitched figures, thickets of shrubs
     in 1939,
Farmlands, small wooden houses,
blue lakes, green village ponds.
     her father arrested, then released.
Now and then, cattle.
Earth covered with high grasses.
     fake passports
Enchanting places, where one
would like to stop.
     a steamship from Hamburg to Havana…

Later, the song rewinds to 1938 and shifts perspective—“after school, they chant her name / she runs home, she prays / but caught because her father couldn’t quite believe / what ought to have been plain to see / til broken glass was at their feet, and now they could not wait…”—before barreling forward across the ocean and finally to Southern California:

Lucky one, she got in,
Some papers signed by distant kin.
And every night she wrote
Six postcards sent back home,
And when she read the brief replies,
My grandmother would start to cry;
The careful script, it could not hide
The fear in every one
She read beneath the L.A. sun
Until the letters did not come.

In my work, I have returned to my grandmother’s story as a cautionary tale: to underscore the dangers of fascism and xenophobia, of brittle attitudes toward immigrants. I remember learning just before I went on stage at the Kennedy Center in 2018 that a man had shot to death nine Jews who were praying at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and that my wife’s childhood rabbi had been in the building (he emerged unscathed). That night, I sang “October 1st, 1939/Port of Hamburg,” whose final refrain seethes:

History don’t stand a chance
Drowning in the false, fat present tense.
And why would you need
To know anything
That happened any earlier than late last week?

But 2018 is not 2026. And those words, it goes without saying, mean something different now than they did eight years ago. As Pankaj Mishra writes in The World After Gaza, “the memory of the Shoah has been perverted to enable mass murder, while obscuring a larger history of modern Western violence outside the West.” Since Hamas’ massacre of some 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli government’s subsequent campaign of collective punishment against the Palestinian people, I have wondered what purpose these pieces of mine serve.

Our beliefs about the present reflect that which we choose to remember about the past. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contested theater of memory that surrounds the conflict in the Middle East. “The Holocaust will forever remain a black hole in human history. But the moral credit card it gave Israel has expired,” writes Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Israeli Knesset. Whether the Holocaust ever granted Israel a “moral credit card” is debatable. But as a Jewish artist descended from those who survived the Nazi regime, I fear that bearing witness to the horrors of the past now bleeds uneasily into the cynical commodification of Jewish trauma: humanity’s mid-century nightmare played on a recursive loop in order to justify the extermination of the Palestinian people.

Beyond worrying that these stories might be used to justify a politics of cruelty, dispossession, or worse, I lament the fact that my work has fallen on deaf ears, that “never again” was always conditional rather than universal. But if telling my grandmother’s story has failed to prevent history from repeating itself, perhaps it has succeeded in lifting a single life—hers—out of the frothing cauldron of weaponized narrative, a means of reminding myself, and others, that history oughtn’t be reduced to politically expedient abstractions. “The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence, and not further suppression and denial,” wrote Edward Said in his preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism. The same could be said for political life in the U.S., where too often, we seem to forget that our “neighbor-enemy,” to borrow Martin Luther King, Jr.’s term, is made of flesh and blood, and that rather than trying to vanquish him, our goal out to be reconciliation.

Those last two sentences are, by design, something of a Rorschach test. Where you sit, the angle of your gaze, determines whether you perceive a stranger as ally or enemy. What I want to say here is that regardless of the figure you see in the inkblot, we will never humanize one people through the dehumanization of another.

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The third, and perhaps final, work for which I’ve drawn from my grandmother’s diaries is Heirloom, a piano concerto written for my father, the pianist and conductor, Jeffrey Kahane. As the title suggests, the work is an inquiry into inheritance, with each movement exploring a different bequest. At its center is “My Grandmother Knew Alban Berg,” in which I wrestle with Lore’s conflicted relationship to German culture in the shadow of its appropriation by the Third Reich. (February 3rd, 1940: “Can one give up [German literature] and say: ‘I am an American, Germany is my enemy. The American culture is greater than the German culture, the German people are primitive?’”)

She answered that question—definitively—in the negative, attending concerts rife with German music for the next seventy years. Her son, Jeffrey, beyond developing a lifelong love of German literature, would become one of the great American interpreters of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann. He, in turn, would pass that love of Germanic music onto me. Lore died a month before I met the woman who would become my wife. Eight years later, our first child was born. Her middle name is Schaefer.

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As always, thank you for reading, and to those of you with paid subscriptions, for making this publication possible. If you’re in a position to upgrade, I’d be delighted, but liking and sharing is great, too!

A few updates: in case you missed it, my new album, Elevator Songs, a collaboration with Roomful of Teeth, is out now. NPR calls it “brilliant” and describes it as “The White Lotus meets Everything Everywhere All At Once.” Next week, I’ll be in Charlotte, North Carolina, to perform emergency shelter intake form with my colleagues Alicia Hall Moran, Holland Andrews, and Holcombe Waller, alongside the Charlotte Symphony and conductor Kwamé Ryan. On July 10th, I turn 45, and decided that what I wanted most for my birthday was to play a concert here in Portland. Later that month, I’ll reunite with my dear pal, Pekka Kuusisto, for a pair of shows in Canada, before heading to London for the BBC Proms, which on August 17th is presenting my clarinet concerto, If love will not swing wide the gates, with soloist Anthony McGill. Finally, stay tuned for news about a European tour of Elevator Songs. Tickets and more information about all of the above can be found here.

I am not a baker. The only concoction you’ll find me slipping into an oven with any regularity is farinata, a chickpea flour pancake studded with onions and chopped rosemary. Ten minutes at 450° and you’ve got a toothsome snack that pleases just about everyone: salty, sweet, featherlight. But cakes? Pies? Not my thing.

On the other hand, I love to cook. And I love cooking because I love to tinker, to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Perhaps a pasta with borlotti beans is tasting drab, so I’ll juice a lemon directly into the pan, giving brightness to an otherwise earthbound dish. Meanwhile, a pan of Brussels sprouts seared in pork fat (enhanced with garlic and chilies), might, after having taken on some color, reach ideal tenderness through the addition of a small quantity of chicken stock and a brief simmer. This is cooking as improvisation, in which our senses tell us what to do next, and why.

I love to cook because of the spontaneity it permits, but also because of the social dimension that inheres to work done around a cutting board, over the stove, or surrounded by quart containers made technicolor by rounds of radish or cucumber. The preparatory stages of baking can, of course, be social. Your kids can help you make cake batter. But once it’s in the oven, the social realm evaporates: standing around a hot oven just isn’t that much fun. When we cook, on the other hand, we can kibbitz as we chop herbs, trade stories as we trim vegetables, tell jokes as we run ragged sheets of pasta through a hand-crank machine. And if something goes awry, there’s usually a way to right the ship.

The same basic binary exists with composing. As my friend Caroline Shaw has said: “writing for orchestra is like baking; writing chamber music is like cooking.” I believe she was speaking about the relative spontaneity that each creative endeavor permits, but the social analogy carries over as well. Let’s begin with the former.

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If you’re punctual, you will turn in parts for an orchestral work several months in advance of the first rehearsal; the cake is now in the oven. If it’s got too much salt or too little sugar, you’re mostly out of luck. That is to say, when you show up to hear your orchestral piece, there’s not much you can do to change it. Here, you’re hemmed in by time pressure—a ten-minute work might receive eighty minutes of rehearsal—but also by the challenge of revising orchestral music on the fly.

Certain kinds of revision take no time at all: you can, for example, clarify a texture by asking someone not to play. A pair of horns you’d intended as harmonic reinforcement might turn out, in rehearsal, to sound overly thick, obscuring a wayward flute line. So you politely ask the horns to lay out. Easy peasy! But the moment you want to add something to a player’s part—even something as ostensibly straight-forward as reassigning material from one instrument to another—you may quickly find that your hands are tied. Swapping a few measures of oboe and clarinet counterpoint might take only a few seconds in one’s notation software, but then there’s the matter of printing out replacement pages, cutting the excerpt to size, and pasting it (physically) into the parts — labor executed by intrepid music librarians.1 You might get away with a tiny change or two on this scale. Still, if it’s a short piece, you’ll need the chutzpah to implement a revision between first reading and dress rehearsal, at which point you’ll be unable to reverse course.

But if you want to change something structurally—say, a climactic passage you’d like to extend by as little as three seconds—you’ve entered the realm of a substantial overhaul that requires reprinting and (potentially) reformatting parts for the entire orchestra, putting in replacement pages for the conductor, and so on. This kind of change is all but impossible to implement within a standard rehearsal schedule.

When I wrote my piano concerto, Heirloom, I was fortunate to know in advance that there were six commissioning ensembles. This gave me breathing room to plan revisions between sets of performances, which were spaced out across two seasons, rather than trying to cram everything into a single week. In the absence of such a luxurious revision process—it’s unusual to have that many performances lined up from the jump—composers often feel undue pressure to try to “get it right” with their first draft, which often means taking fewer risks, and writing with an eye toward what can be achieved efficiently with limited rehearsal time. While it’s valuable to have these practical considerations in mind, it can also be creatively stifling.

And then there’s the human element.

It is exceedingly rare for a composer to have substantive relationships with all or even most of the musicians in an orchestra. As a result, she tends to write with an abstract idea of “oboist” or “clarinetist,” rather than for specific human beings. For better or worse, this is the status quo, and some composers may prefer it that way. But for me, writing for specific people and personalities is inextricably linked to what makes composing meaningful.

When I wrote American Studies for the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, I had the clarion violin sounds of Colin Jacobsen and Johnny Gandelsman in mind, as well as the rhythmic vitality of the group as a whole. But I’d also known these four guys socially for the better part of two decades: we’d gotten drunk together, seen each other through illnesses, breakups, the births of children. In this sense, there’s an interpersonal component to the solitary act of writing. It’s almost epistolary: we’re sending a message, through printed music, to the individuals who will perform the work. But correspondence becomes conversation when the workshop or rehearsal process begins. And this has never been clearer to me than in the way that I made Elevator Songs for, and with, Roomful of Teeth.

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I had long been a fan of the much-lauded vocal band when I joined them for a workshop at MASS MoCA in the summer of 2022. Over several afternoons, we got to know each other musically and socially. I asked each of them to make audio recordings of their favorite extended techniques, as well as to sing a few bars of a pop song they loved. What I received amounted to a small trove of vocal wonder: yodels, yelps, growls, screams, “mouse sounds,” and more. But how would I make use of these resources?

Almost a decade earlier, I’d worked with the English theater director John Tiffany on the stage production of The Ambassador, which we developed at Carolina Performing Arts in Chapel Hill, before heading to BAM in December of 2014. Early in the process, the scenic designers Christine Jones and Brett Banakis had conjured a singular visual world, fabricating a miniature Los Angeles out of obsolescent media: here were iconic hotels built out of old film canisters, skyscrapers built out of VHS tapes and books, the Hollywood Hills represented by mammoth stacks of screenplays. John’s genius manifested in his ability to maximize the impact of every artifact on stage. He taught me how to regard an object and make the most of it. When I worked with Roomful of Teeth, I had him in mind.

The evening before our final day together at MASS MoCA, I wrote a lyric inspired by my strange accommodations. I had been put up at a Holiday Inn that was in the process of being rebranded as a boutique hotel. Signage for both properties was visible. Glass-enclosed conference rooms played host to blue tarps loosely concealing piles of jagged concrete. I saw few other guests, but heard strange, indecipherable sounds at all hours of the night. To be honest, this hotel is kind of creepy, I scrawled on a sheet of hotel stationery.

The rest of the lyric came fairly quickly, as I imagined other guests in this largely empty hotel.

And the woman, next door, she is in mourning,
And the couple upstairs, well, good for them...

Working quickly, I decided that there would be three verses and two interludes, the latter sections making space to exhibit the technical and expressive range of the ensemble. Over the last fifteen years, Roomful of Teeth has amassed a considerable library of techniques, many of which call on the individual members to improvise. One of my favorite aspects of working in this era—in which so many professional musicians are ready and willing to take creative ownership of a score—is the ability to divest occasionally from the decision-making process: to empower interpreters to make their own choices while becoming, in effect, co-composers of the work.

This is precisely what happens in the second interlude of “Speaking in Tongues,” in which I instruct two of the singers, Mingjia Chen and Steven Bradshaw, to do “morse code-like improvisations” on given pitches, while Thann Scoggin—a heavy metal enthusiast—is asked to create menacing radio static through satanic growls. At the same time, the rest of the ensemble, singing a simple, looping chord progression, modulates its tone with each cycle, growing increasingly caustic, confrontational, ecstatic.

The texture that results from this loose musical map is something I could never have fully conceived on my own, let alone notated. I have the sense, in listening to the recording, that the group and I have met on a bridge over a plunging canyon to create something that neither of us could have made independently.

When we returned to MASS MoCA a year later, in August of 2023, I was supposed to have written half the piece. In fact, I had not written a single note, and the premiere was less than three months off. In an effort to save face, I suggested that we use the time to generate material for the libretto. I wanted to work, as I often do, from my imagination, but I also hoped that the lives of the singers would be reflected in the songs I was to create. To that end, I gathered a series of prompts to pose to the group: what’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you on tour? What was your worst date? What do you pack when you go on tour? And so on…

For six hours (interrupted by a lunch break), we sat in a loose circle in a light-soaked dance studio, shooting the shit. The ensuing conversations did generate a tremendous amount of material—a number of the songs in the piece are based on tales told during our time together—but they also brought us closer together. We aired embarrassing stories, laughed and cried, witnessed friendships blossom and deepen. We might have been sitting at a rough-hewn wooden table in someone’s backyard, shelling fava beans and drinking white wine while absent-mindedly bringing crumbled hunks of pecorino cheese to our lips.

Back in my studio in Portland the following week, I transcribed our conversations and began to write for these eight singers with whom I’d developed a degree of intimacy that the orchestral ecosystem simply doesn’t allow. Here, I felt rather like a tailor might while building a suit for a customer, matching music and text to singer and sensibility rather than fabric to skin tone or eye color. These are songs I couldn’t have written without those individuals in mind. And that, I think, is as it should be: the performer not just as muse, but as friend.

Tonight, I will stir polenta while a chicken roasts. My younger daughter will make a shallot vinaigrette on a low wooden bench while the older one slices potatoes and crucifers, dousing them with a generous glug of olive oil and a flurry of salt. My wife will open a bottle of wine, maybe put on a record. Tomorrow, I’ll fly to Burlington, Vermont, where, on Friday, Roomful of Teeth and I will begin our tour for Elevator Songs. Hope to see you there.

Thank you as always for reading, and to those of you with paid subscriptions, for making this newsletter possible. Please consider liking, sharing, or commenting on this post, which will help its visibility. And if you’ve been waffling on upgrading, now’s as good a time as any.

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1.

An elevator is a transitional space. Transitions can be—often are—quite vulnerable. I’ve sometimes wondered if the heavy silence that fills elevators is a function of that vulnerability: pursed lips protecting soft bellies during short trips to the surgeon’s office, the divorce lawyer, a hotel room. Long before people stopped talking to each other on airplanes, there was an unspoken rule that you didn’t talk to strangers in elevators.

2.

On Halloween night last year, I snailed my way into a hotel elevator in downtown Brooklyn, weighed down by a pair of guitars and a disintegrating box of vinyl records. A woman in her fifties, wearing a gold lamé dress and the subtle fragrance of gin, stumbled in happily, too drunk not to make eye contact. I smiled at her. “Mother of the bride,” she chirped. I congratulated her, asked about the wedding.

“Beautiful. It was beautiful.”

I wanted to know more, but I’d reached my floor.

3.

One feature of the touring musician’s brain is that no matter how many hotels you’ve stayed in on any given tour, you manage, always, to remember your room number for the precise duration of your stay, and not a moment longer. You will forget it promptly upon checking into the next hotel.

4.

In the summer of 2023, as I prepared to write the piece that would become Elevator Songs, I sat with members of Roomful of Teeth in a sun-drenched dance studio on the campus of a sprawling art museum in Western Massachusetts, where I queried them about their experiences on the road. Over the course of six hours, I heard tales of tepid hot tubs, capsule wardrobes, in-room steam rituals, and the odd civil war reenactment conference.

5.

Elevator Songs is a kind of thought experiment: if we were to exit the elevator and follow those mostly silent strangers into their rooms (in a totally uncreepy way), what would we see and hear? Newlyweds coiled close to one another after a road trip through Utah? A fashion/travel influencer with a mobile podcast recording studio and a soft spot for Carl Jung? A struggling indie rock duo? An emotionally bombed out U.S. Army veteran? Would the laws of time and space hold, or would they give way to something more plastic?

6.

The loose container of this thought experiment gave me permission to write about whatever I wanted. Refreshingly—at least for me—there was no particular political project, no overarching theme. Some of the songs are drawn from stories I heard during our loose getting-to-know-you workshop in Western Mass; others spring from my imagination.

7.

It’s said that every sophomore record
Is a diary of planes and motels,
And strip mall record shops,
The arguments that run for hours
In rental cars all packed like Tetris,
Lobby coffee, daily bomb threats 
Nothing to write mom about… 

— “Sophomore Record” (Room 1211)

8.

Yesterday, walking through Brooklyn on my way to a recording studio, I watched a young father scold his towheaded toddler for “skipping four” while counting his steps in a crosswalk. I wanted to shake him (the father) by the shoulders and assure him that in two years, he will lament the fact that his toddler no longer skips the number four. In this moment, I am tired of being itinerant. The romance of the road is dead, replaced by a desire to be at home with my children, the younger of whom only recently stopped skipping fifteen.

9.

fourteen sixteen seventeen eighteen

10.

Going up.

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For folks in the Midwest, Attacca Quartet and I will be appearing on March 25th at Denison University in Ohio. The program features David Lang’s daisy, as well as two larger works of mine—the String Quartet No. 1, “Klee” and Final Privacy Song—plus a handful of songs. (Attacca and I will reunite a week later to record an album…) The concert is free, but tickets are required.

On April 9th, Anthony McGill and The Knights give the New York premiere of my clarinet concerto, If love will not swing wide the gates, at Carnegie Hall. The characteristically wide-ranging program, conducted by Eric Jacobsen, also features music by Margaret Bonds, Ljova, Duke Ellington, and Aaron Copland. A dozen or so tickets remain.

Later that month, Roomful of Teeth and I hit the road in celebration of the release of Elevator Songs, which arrives on April 3rd via Octoverse Media. We’ll be making stops in Burlington, New York, Groton (MA), Nashville, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Tickets & information can be found here. In case you missed it, we released a second single from the album last week, featuring the sublime singing of Mingjia Chen. A veritable truckload of LPs arrived at my house yesterday, and I don’t mind telling you that they are gorgeous objects, designed by my frequent collaborator John Gall. Pre-orders will begin shipping shortly. Have at ‘em!

That’s all for now. Thank you so much for reading + supporting this newsletter.

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“Not Even the Dead” is set against the long shadow of the so-called “Forever Wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those post-9/11 quagmires, which stretched over two decades, hummed along in the background of American life, often invisibly and inaudibly. The burden of these conflicts fell largely on a minuscule fraction of the population: less than one percent of all U.S. citizens served overseas, of whom more than half completed multiple tours of duty. Of the three million or so Americans who fought in those wars, nearly two-thirds returned with an officially recognized disability. Tens of thousands sustained serious bodily harm—brain injuries, lost limbs, paralysis—with countless more affected by PTSD. Three thousand veterans of those wars have committed suicide.1

As the United States leaps brashly into another war of choice, it is worth considering the profound betrayal that the attacks on Iran represent for American families whose lives were upended by the Forever Wars, who believed that Trump’s isolationist rhetoric signaled the end of imperialist American foreign policy. In hindsight, “America First” turns out to have been a transient rallying cry that brought together—for naked political gain—a loose coalition of Christian nationalists, economic protectionists, and shellshocked military families. If that alliance has been fractured, the lives of many who fought our wars have been inexorably undone.

Each tune on Elevator Songs (save the first and last, sung by me) was written for a particular member of Roomful of Teeth. “Not Even the Dead” features Mingjia Chen, who, in addition to being a fierce songwriter and composer, is gifted with one of the most malleable and expressive instruments I’ve ever encountered. If you’ve listened to “Speaking in Tongues,” you will have heard her, at the climax of the second interlude, come to the center of the texture, yelping, keening, pleading with terrifying ferocity. Here, you will experience her in intimate devastation mode.

Now, as ever, is a great time to pre-order your copy of Elevator Songs in the format of your choice. This record required the labor of so many folks, which means that, yes, it cost a good deal of money to make. Your support, as ever, would mean the world to all of us.

In other news, I’ll be playing songs new and old at Strum PDX on Saturday, March 14th, backed by the crack rhythm section of Andrew Jones and Matt Mayhall. A few dozen tickets remain. Tickets are also on sale for the Elevator Songs tour, which kicks off on April 17th in Burlington, VT, and will continue with stops in NYC, Boston (ish), Nashville, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Those shows will feature successive solo sets from Teeth & me, after which we’ll come together to perform the album in its entirety. Hope to see you there! Lastly, thank you as always for reading.

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A few days ago, I cried in a classroom. But it wasn’t a teacher who made me weep. I was the teacher. And it was four students at the University of Iowa who, during a string quartet coaching, brought me to tears.

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The five of us sat in a sun-drenched studio on the third floor of the Voxman Music Building, where I was to hear American Studies, which I’d originally written for Brooklyn Rider. Rooted in themes from a song called “To Be American,” it’s a tricky piece studded with rhythmic and harmonic treachery. As the students began to play, I was swiftly won over by the group’s rhythmic confidence. Without breaking a sweat, they navigated rapidly shifting meter changes in what was, all in all, a formidable performance. And yet these young musicians seldom looked at each other, while shifts in character and mood seemed to elude them.

When I coach chamber music, I often dive headlong into the nitty-gritty, offering suggestions having to do with phrasing, harmony, intonation, or color. But in this encounter, I had an instinct to try something different. With my friend in mind—he has an outsized gift for expressing musical ideas through image or metaphor—I suggested to the quartet that we break the piece into scenes, and then describe, in nonmusical terms, the action within each one.

We agreed that the opening statement, in which violins chatter astride a jocular dance in the lower voices, was all light and sunshine, a frolic in a field. A wedding had just taken place on a rented farm. Between the ceremony and dinner, a group of guests had taken up party games on a sprawling expanse of grass: corn-hole, ring toss, frisbee. No thoughts of flights or rental car returns or heading back to the office on Monday. Just pure joy.

Scene change: a transition presents itself in the form of a small melodic cell—a descending, dotted figure—which is repeated several times, its rhythmic identity remaining mostly stable as the harmonic ground shifts underneath. The quartet is asked to play at a healthy dynamic until a sudden pianissimo augurs a shift in tone.

When the students played this passage the first time, they steamrolled through the pianissimo and the character change that ought to have followed. We spoke about the music a bit more and decided that the pianissimo arrives as the wedding revelers discover a gap between two boards in a barn just beyond the tent. A strange light shone through the space between these warped wooden planks; as the transition progressed, the revelers would slip through the boards, making their way into the barn, where a glowing, golden sofa awaited them.

The students tackled the transition again, and now, making eye contact, directed their energy toward each other. Here, the pianissimo arrived with a well-wrought sense of drama. Engaging their collective imagination, the ensemble tightened technically, too: rhythm and attack were now more unified, a reminder that expression and technique do not exist in distinct realms.

The second episode of American Studies takes the tune and twists it, hammering once-pure harmonies with sour notes and angular sonorities. I suggested that as the revelers sat down on the golden sofa, the micro-dosing they’d been subjected to (!?) during pre-ceremony drinks would start to kick in and that a slinky cat in a pink tuxedo would now appear and commence a lecture on continental philosophy.

When the quartet took another stab at this section, their playing became even more dynamic. Unbidden, the violinists introduced sultry slides between notes; I could picture the cat in its pastel finery. I asked the students to stop and spoke a few words of encouragement. It was at this moment—having only minutes prior offered the group an absurd image to hold in their minds—that I began to cry.

Why? If nothing else, I’ve been feeling tender for days. Two-and-a-half weeks into a three-week jaunt away from home, I miss my wife and children. I miss the smell of the soil in our garden after it’s rained. The hotel check-in routine has taken on a grating, Groundhog Day-like quality. And that’s not to speak of the wider world, the sense that we’re all being force-fed a surfeit of bad news that we’re unequipped to hold.

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But in that practice room, watching these four musicians draw closer to one another, closer to the music, I felt alright. I was alert to the social dimension of music, which, at its best, allows us to become more aware of each other’s humanness. Ultimately, though, what made me cry may simply have been a sense of agency: of having helped to make something—even a dinky ten-minute string quartet—a tiny bit better. At a moment when the feeling of powerlessness is often paralyzing, the coaching reminded me that modest local acts (of service, of art-making) with immediately palpable results may keep us sane.

This will strike some as self-evident. But it bears repeating in an era of hyperpolitics, a coinage popularized by the Belgian historian Anton Jäger, whose book of the same name has just been published in English. Jäger offers a concise analysis of political life over the last century, mapped onto two axes: an x-axis describing politicization (how politically engaged a population is), and a y-axis describing institutionalization (the extent to which a society is engaged with trade unions, social clubs, religious organizations, membership-based political parties, and so on).

Hyperpolitics refers to an era in which everything is political, even as social capital—as the term was used by the sociologist Robert Putnam in his classic Bowling Alone—is at an all-time low. Union membership in the U.S., for example, hovers around 9%, a more than two-fold decline since the early eighties. At the same time, participation in social clubs and religious organizations has plummeted—with the notable exception of the evangelical church. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.

Meanwhile, the barrier to entry for political participation has never been lower, which, counterintuitively, may explain why so much activism rooted in the internet has proved to be ineffectual: without robust social, professional, or religious bonds anchored to the physical world, it’s difficult for movements to sustain themselves. As Jäger writes, “for fledgling social movements operating in debt-driven service economies, the solidarities of the online world remain an insufficient replacement for those of the local community and workplace.” In this sense, engaging one’s local community isn’t just a way of creating a sense of agency. It’s also a means of rebuilding the social bonds necessary to revive sustainable networks built for societal transformation.

I take Jäger’s book as an urgent call to action. Anything we can do to restore communal bonds, to foreground the group rather than the individual, will help us build the organizations necessary to meet this confounding political moment. Ours is an era of ideological dealignment, one in which antiquated conceptions of left and right are collapsing in the wake of generational drift, opening up new opportunities for class-consciousness oriented toward a rejection of oligarchy. As techno-accelerationists rush feverishly toward an AI-based world that marginalizes human agency and creativity, we need—now more than ever—a durable movement with which to fight back.

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Thank you all for reading, and to paid subscribers, for helping this publication to thrive. As a reminder, liking, sharing, or commenting helps posts to become more visible to others, so smash those various buttons as you see fit. In case you missed it, my new album, Elevator Songs, a collaboration with Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, is now available for pre-order via Bandcamp. (For customers outside the United States, you’ll get much more competitive shipping rates via Burning Shed.) Lastly, I’ll be on tour with Roomful of Teeth in the U.S. in April. And if you’re in Iowa City this weekend, please stop by the final performances (for a while) of my solo musical plays, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers; dinner will be served in between! Tickets and information for all dates can be found here.

Roomful of Teeth and I made an album. It’s called Elevator Songs. I wrote it. The nine of us perform it. I’ve been told not to call it a radio play but it’s not not a radio play. Set in an inter-dimensional hotel, it is fantastical and strange and funny and sad. We recorded it in a whirlwind four-day session back in December of 2024 with the incomparable Joseph Lorge behind the desk. (Joe just won his first Grammy for best engineered album; please clap.) For better and worse, I think this album sounds more like “me” than anything I’ve made in some time. You can pre-order it via Bandcamp in any number of formats now.

In celebration of the announcement, we’re releasing the first single, “Speaking in Tongues,” which functions as a kind of prologue. Below is a video, created by my frequent collaborator Robert Edridge-Waks.

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Okay, so a bit about how this piece came to be. Early in 2022, Cameron Beauchamp and Brad Wells—artistic director and founder of Roomful of Teeth, respectively—asked if I would write a “songbook” for their group. Teeth is known for its otherworldly ensemble work, but very seldom do the individual singers have opportunities to be heard extensively as soloists. What emerged was a cycle of ten songs: one for each member of the group, bookended by a pair of tunes that I sing.

In an effort to make the most of everyone’s musicianship, I asked each singer to record voice memos with all of their favorite extended tricks and techniques. Meanwhile, I wrote a violin part for Eliza Bagg, who is as beautiful a player as she is a singer; same goes for the golden-throated Jodie Landau, who oversees vibraphone duties throughout the album. I serve as general accompanist, playing guitars, odd synths, and some piano here and there. Suffice it to say, making music with this crew has been one of the great joys of my creative life.

Pre-orders in all physical formats come with signed hotel stationary while supplies last, so don’t dawdle! The limited vinyl editions — one for the U.S., and one for the rest of the world — also come with double-sided, framable art prints by John Gall, who designed the whole package. (He did the artwork for Heirloom and Magnificent Bird, as well as the cover of that Murakami novel sitting on your shelf.) And some good news: for the first time, customers outside the U.S. do not need to pay outlandish shipping fees. Thanks to a partnership with Burning Shed, non-U.S. customers can get involved without taking on a second mortgage.

We’ll be hitting the road in April with stops in six U.S. cities. The shows will unfold like a three-course pre fixe menu: Teeth and I will each offer brief sets on our own; after intermission we’ll come together to perform Elevator Songs. Stay tuned for news about action across the pond, which we hope to share soon. Tickets and more information about the U.S. tour can be found here.

Finally, a big thank you to some of the key folks who made this happen: the piece was commissioned by Roomful of Teeth with support from the Meany Center for the Performing Arts, Hancher Auditorium at the University of Iowa, and San Francisco Performances. The recording was made possible through the generous support of Bill Cooney and Ruth Eliel, Cathy Friedman at the Sonia Alden Foundation, Teddy Abrams, Raulee Marcus, Justus Schlichting, and Linda Hutchins. Finally, big big thanks to Ian Blackaby and Mara Isaacs at Octoverse Media, the brand new label which is releasing the album with major support from Thomas M. Neff. We couldn’t have done it without you.

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This weekend, I perform Pattern of the Rail with the Charlotte Symphony. Next week I’m in residence at the University of Iowa, where I’ll conclude this tour with a pair of solo shows, my musical plays Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers. I’ve also added a show back home in Portland on March 14th at the very intimate Strum PDX (tickets are extremely limited), where I’ll be joined by Andrew Jones on bass and Matt Mayhall on drums. More info about all dates can be found here.

Thank you as always for reading and supporting. Please consider smashing that like button to feed the thirsty algorithm. Stay warm, stay safe, and love thy neighbor.

And yet, there are signs of hope, first among them, the extraordinary courage of the people of Minneapolis. Reporting from the ground suggests that the masses turning out in subzero cold are not just resistance libs, but rather represent a broad swath of Minnesotans who refuse to be terrorized by the administration’s goons. For Minneapolitans (what a great demonym!), there is nothing abstract about the koan “no one is safe until everyone is safe.”

I have often lamented that our politics seems rooted in contempt and division rather than in brotherly love and shared material concern. But change may be afoot. If the 2010s played host to an epidemic of performative scolding, supercharged by the incentives of social media algorithms—which taught us that shaming our peers (or strangers) would be rewarded with (viral) social capital—the last month signals the possibility of a vibe shift. When your neighbors are being murdered in the street, disagreements that once seemed to warrant a scuffle now melt into irrelevance. It’s too soon to say how durable this new ethos of “neighborism” will be, but for the moment, the era of purity tests and circular firing squads seems to have abated. Indeed, as the regime operates with increasing impunity, many Americans seem to recognize that the defeat of authoritarianism will require a broad-based movement: not only with respect to strategy and tactics, but as pertains to ideological diversity as well.

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These are strange times. Each day unfolds as a waking nightmare interrupted by moments of beauty, solidarity, and hope. And it is against this backdrop of national limbo that I find myself returning to old work — a kind of limbo in itself, albeit with lower stakes. Next week, I’ll have an announcement about one upcoming project, with others on the way. In the meantime, I’m reviving my solo musical plays, Magnificent Bird and Book of Travelers, which I will perform first at Yale’s Schwarzman Center before heading to Montclair State and University of Iowa, with a stopover in North Carolina to do a suite from Book of Travelers with the Charlotte Symphony. (Information about all tour dates can be found here.)

One of the presenters asked if I would write a brief essay discussing what it means to revisit these works now. I agreed, then reversed myself, having concluded that there was little I could say that the pieces themselves didn’t already articulate. The songs—in their search to transcend tidy political binaries (Book of Travelers), while exploring the consequences of our increasingly digital lives (Magnificent Bird)—still bellow into the maelstrom of our moment. So in lieu of an essay, I sent the presenter an excerpt from Thomas Merton’s essay, “Contemplation in a World of Action.” It’s a passage I recite a little more than halfway through Magnificent Bird, and a text that has taken on a scripture-like quality in my own life:

He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas… We have more power at our disposal today than we have ever had, and yet we are more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and of love than we have ever been.

When I was performing at Playwrights Horizons in 2024, these words registered as elegy. In some ways they still do. But since the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, and the example set by tens of thousands of Americans organizing to protect their neighbors, Merton’s exhortation to deepen our “freedom, integrity and capacity to love” seems less remote, and more like gentle encouragement to stay the course. Indeed, in Minneapolis, Springfield, Lewiston, and elsewhere, those “doctrinaire prejudices” seem to have been set aside in favor of “the inner ground of meaning and of love.” In moments of optimism, I perceive the mobilization of these communities as an indication that negative solidarity—dominant for the last three election cycles—is losing its appeal among Americans across the political spectrum.

Witness, for example, the frequent rejiggering in right-wing circles of the targeted “other,” which, in and of itself, suggests that scapegoat politics may be flailing. First it was trans people, then it was Haitians, then trans people again, then (nonwhite) pro-Palestinian activists, then Latinos, then Somalis. For white nationalist paleoconservatives, there’s nothing inconsistent about this; it’s all within the remit of a plan to cleanse America of everyone but straight white folks. But the nosedive in Trump’s approval on immigration indicates that when the rubber meets the road, a healthy majority of Americans believe that terrorizing immigrant communities does not make America safer, more prosperous, or more just.

Meanwhile, liberal contempt for an imagined monolith of Trump voters seems like it just might be subsiding. As more conservatives speak out against ICE’s campaign of terror, some who might once have angrily typed “you voted for this” may now recognize the futility of lashing out at those who’ve reached moral red lines, albeit belatedly. For others, though, welcoming former Trump apologists into the resistance is fraught, which brings to mind a passage from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Forgiveness”:

In order to approach… the very concept of forgiveness, logic and common sense agree for once with the paradox: it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin from the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable, what the church calls ‘venial sin’, then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear. If there is something to forgive, it would be what in religious language is called mortal sin, the worst, the unforgivable crime or harm… Forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable… That is to say that forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself.

(emphasis mine)

Forgiveness is an act of faith in man’s capacity to change. Or to put it in religious terms, because each of us contains the seed of good and evil, “the image of God is never totally gone… even the worst segregationist can become an integrationist,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it in 1961. Thus, it follows that “there is something within human nature that can be changed.” We have seen it happen in our recent political past, as the vilest expressions of Trumpism have opened the eyes of many to the dangers of nativism, materialism, chauvinism, and more. Minneapolis may yet be our Selma: a spectacle of suffering that demonstrates the lengths some would go to revitalize white supremacy, wresting moderates from inaction and indifference.

But liberals may also need to ask for mercy. For much of the last decade, the reflexive response to the rise of Trumpism has been one not of self-examination but of sanctimony. For too long, mainstream Democrats refused to acknowledge the Party’s failure to provide a meaningful alternative to Reagan-era policies which gave rise to unsustainable levels of economic inequality—conditions under which right-wing populism began to metastasize. Moreover, as the Epstein files have revealed, a bipartisan class of elites has long operated in a legally impenetrable shadow world—not just with respect to sex crimes, but in all manner of economic and governmental affairs—enriching and empowering themselves at the expense of average Americans.

In this sense, Trump is not an anomaly, but a symptom of the system, stripped of the surface illusion of decency. As the New York-based Cuban writer Carlos Manuel Álvarez wrote on October 30, 2024 in El Pais, “to see half of the nation trying to annihilate Trump is like watching a body attempting to get rid of its shadow.” Thus, we would do well—as a nation—to remember, with James Baldwin, that “what you’re looking at is also you… you could be that person. You could be that monster.”

Last night, after my first performance of Book of Travelers in well over a year, I had drinks with a clinical psychologist who teaches here at Yale. He told me that one of the things he admired about the piece was its rejection of, as he put it, “epistemic certitude.” Put more simply: the songs reveal something about the people I met on the train without judgment or editorialization. In juxtaposing the lives of half a dozen passengers I met during my journey, I am asking, aspirationally: “how, given our differences, can we learn to live with one another?” In this unruly, possibly ungovernable nation of nearly four hundred million souls, there are no easy answers. And yet, the more we give ourselves over to humility, curiosity, and uncertainty, the more we make space in the rooms of our hearts for those we may have mistakenly written off as the enemy. King’s admonition bears repeating: the goal is to defeat evil systems, not people.

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Thank you as always for reading, and to my paid subscribers, for your support, which makes this newsletter possible. Please consider liking or sharing this post! Meanwhile, my new album, Heirloom, featuring a piano concerto I wrote for my father, is now available via Bandcamp. Finally, for those in the Boston area, while I do not have a make-up date for the Cambridge concert that was postponed due to uncertain weather, we’ve just announced a show at Groton Hill Music Center on April 18th with Roomful of Teeth. Hope to see you there!

Limping Waltz

Gas mask and megaphone,
Slogans and signs,
black-coated picket line.

Roadblock and riot gear;
Shots will ring out,
scatter the crowd, oh you’re terrified—

But hey kid, remember this:
There are more of us
Than the cold smirking merchants,
And don’t let those vultures get
To the best of your heart—
Listen, it’s urgent.

Or maybe I’ve got it wrong—
A pale bloodless coup;
Keystrokes, they follow you…

The sheep watch on tiny screens
Tapping away,
Unsure of what to say, when to say

Moonstruck, high enough
To forget the world,
The weight of the darkening
Cloudburst, you fear the worst
As you try to find
The phrase that will speak

To this crater of time,
This factory of crime
With its black boots and stiff-armed
Salutes, you would laugh
If it weren’t so deadly serious.

Too late for fables now;
The judge has been bought,
So much for common law.

So why then this limping waltz?
I sing it for you
There in the future
For safekeeping,

On a silent beach, the metal key,
Hold it up to your ear,
listen for wisdom:
A thing or two, about what not to do,
How we broke the world,
broke what was beautiful.

—

Sending love and light and resilience to Minneapolis

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My new album, Heirloom, featuring a piano concerto I wrote for my father, is now available via Bandcamp. I’ll be heading out on tour next week; complete dates are here.

Hello. The world is a mess. I am heartbroken, as I suspect are many of you. And yet! I’m going out on tour next month. I would love to see you.

I’m basically doing three(ish) things this spring:

1. Reprising my repertory solo shows, Magnificent Bird / Book of Travelers: I’ll do back-to-back presentations in a single afternoon/evening in New Haven (four shows total on 2/4 and 2/5), Montclair (2/7), and in Iowa City (2/22). The Boston show (2/1) is Book of Travelers.

2. Roomful of Teeth and I will be doing Elevator Songs in Burlington, New York, Nashville, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Format is as follows: I play a short solo set, they do a short solo set, and then we come back on the second half to do Elevator Songs, a collection of tunes set in an inter-dimensional hotel, written by me and performed by the nine of us. It’s one of my favorite projects of the last little while.

3. This season, I’m in residence with the Charlotte Symphony and University of Iowa. With Charlotte, I’ll be singing Pattern of the Rail: Six Orchestral Songs from Book of Travelers in February, and then doing emergency shelter intake form in May. In Iowa City, in addition to the pair of solo shows, I’ll be singing a set of murder ballads with the university orchestra. Three of them are mine (including “Empire Liquor Mart”) and one is by Bob Dylan.

Tickets are now on sale for all of these shows. Spread the word if you like!

Meanwhile, there’s lots of stuff going on in the background — more that I hope to share soon. In the interim: what would you like to see me write about this year? Please feel free to put your thoughts in the comments!

Please stay safe and make good trouble. And thank you as always for your support.

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An unspeakably long year, 2025. Distended, even. Before the inauguration, there were the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles. My parents, residents of Altadena, have just now moved back into their home after ten months of mitigation for lead, asbestos, smoke, et cetera. And they are among the luckiest ones. (You can help those affected by the fire here.) Then there was the shock and awe of the first hundred days: rafts of cruel executive orders, DOGE, “Big Balls,” detentions, deportations, state-sanctioned kidnappings, and, yes, Liberation Day.

That barely gets us into the second quarter of this seemingly interminable and godforsaken year. But for all the misery (and possibly irreparable damage) caused by this administration, we may be reaching some kind of turning point as a country. I have the sense, if only anecdotally, that people are exhausted by the way we’re living: in a war-like state of mutual contempt made worse by the incentives of the attention economy, where rhetorical venom and zero-sum political analysis are rewarded by unscrupulous algorithms designed to juice engagement/profit, even (and often) at the expense of social cohesion and basic decency.

And that’s not to speak of collective exhaustion regarding the material state of the world, which finds billionaires growing richer by the day while the rest of us go bug-eyed trying to balance our monthly budgets. Now, Zohran Mamdani may not succeed as mayor of New York. He may be too inexperienced, his policies impractical, the city ungovernable. But his campaign was revolutionary. It was revolutionary because he made listening to voters central to his dogged canvassing, which in turn revealed the theme that would come to dominate not only his campaign, but those of a whole slate of candidates well to his political right: affordability. For someone who identifies as a socialist, Mamdani avoided (for the most part) ideologically charged rhetoric, choosing instead to adopt a plainspoken and accessible vocabulary that helped him assemble a winning coalition.

There may be a lesson here for all of us. Rather than trying to define ourselves tribally with flags, symbols, and emoji, we might take a page from Mamdani’s book and, forgoing ideological bluster, ask our neighbors what’s important to them: what keeps them up at night, what’s holding them back from living, as it were, their best lives. Earlier this year, the labor journalist wrote an essay about how to talk to people with whom you disagree, and this passage resonated:

When you talk to people with competing beliefs, do not start out by talking about political positions. Instead, talk about values. Do not say, “What do you think about issue X, and why?” Instead say, “What are the things that you think are important? What are the values that you want to teach your kids? What are the qualities that you think make a person good? What are the values that you try to uphold in your own life?”

If you can get down to the bedrock of values, you will often find that you and the enemy across from you will say that you believe the same things. You both believe, for example, in fairness. You both believe that people should uphold their responsibilities. You both believe that people should respect one another. You both believe that everyone should be treated equally. You both believe that it is good to help people in need. Etcetera. The kindergarten stuff.

This is how I have tried to talk to strangers, dating back to my 2016 post-election train trip. Also crucial, I have found, is to reflect back what you hear. “So if I understand you correctly, you worry about providing for your children. Is that right?” The more that someone feels seen and heard, the more likely they are to reciprocate: to see and hear you. Common ground often reveals itself when two people have extended toward each other a mutual willingness not only to listen, but to provide receipts for that act of generosity in the form of verbal reflection.

I realize I’m rehashing some of what I wrote last month about false polarization and the role of the artist in times of crisis. But it bears repeating at a time when many of us feel powerless in the face of an unshameable kakistocracy fueled by white nationalism, score-settling, and greed. The daily practice of connecting with your neighbors might just be the most important work you can do—both politically and morally—as we prepare for the 2026 midterm elections.

Welp, I hadn’t planned on getting bogged down in the state of the world, but there you have it. [brushes hands, exhales.]

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On a personal level, it’s been a year of challenges and rewards. There were a number of musical highlights: conducting Carla Kihlstedt’s 26 Little Deaths in San Francisco; performing HEXAGONS with my neighbor/friend-for-life Caroline Shaw at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; the premiere of If love will not swing wide the gates, which I wrote for Anthony McGill; a house concert here in Portland that had an outsize impact on my heart and mind; conducting the Oregon Symphony in an evening with M. Ward here in Portland.

There was also a fair amount of writing: much of it in this space, a bit for The Atlantic, and more for a project I hope to be able to reveal sooner rather than later. I want to thank all of you for being such engaged readers, and for supporting this newsletter in myriad ways. As of a few days ago, I’ve reached 5,000 subscribers, which is a nice milestone. That said, there’s always room to grow. Below are the five most popular posts of the year; perhaps there’s someone in your life who might like to read one or all of them?

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Last but not least, I’ve decided to offer another online master class. The format will be identical to the one last summer. This intensive will run for three hours on three consecutive Sundays: January 11, 18, and 25, at the following times:

12pm-3pm | Los Angeles  
3pm-6pm | New York
8pm-11pm | London 
9pm-12am | Berlin 

(with apologies to those in Australia and East Asia)

The creative focus of this intensive will be determined largely by the work that’s brought in by its participants. My hope is that we’ll address topics relating to songwriting, arranging, and composition, as well as the role of the artist as citizen. This intensive will be open to fifteen participants, each of whom will receive 30-40 minutes of individual feedback on their work.

Pricing:

Full participant — $250 for the complete intensive (nine hours over three consecutive Sundays, with 30-40 minutes of individual feedback). Participants will be able to “unmute” to ask questions even when they are not presenting their own work. This tier is limited to fifteen individuals to ensure that everyone receives personalized attention. Register now.

Observers — $100 to observe the complete intensive. Observers will not present their own work. Register now. (All sessions will be recorded, so observers need not watch them in real time; zoom links will be sent via email in the days leading up to the event.)

N.B. I’m going to prioritize participants who did not join the first workshop in August. If you were an active participant in those sessions and would like to attend again, please send me an email; if the workshop isn’t sold out within a few days, I’ll let you know that there is space available. (And of course you are welcome to register as an observer no matter what!)

Discounts:

I’m offering the following discounts to paid subscribers, so if you’ve been on the fence about taking the plunge, perhaps this is your moment:

Founding level ($150/yr) subscribers are eligible to receive $100 off full participant fee (use code FOUNDING at checkout); free admission to observe. (If you are a founding member and wish to observe, just send me an email, and I will share zoom links at the appropriate time.)

n.b. founding members to the newsletter also receive a link to download my complete digital discography (9 LPs, 3 EPs, 6 singles)

Annual subscribers ($50/yr) are eligible to receive $50 off either full participant or observer fee - use code ANNUAL when registering for the intensive.

Please note that registration will automatically cut off at fifteen participants (no limit on observers), so if your desire to upgrade to a paid subscription is contingent on getting an active spot in the workshop, please register first to claim your spot so as to avoid buyer’s remorse. The discount codes operate on an honor system. If you’re not a paid subscriber and you use the discount, I’ll know. ;-)

If you aren’t able to secure a spot in the workshop because it’s sold out, please leave a comment, and as soon as there’s a critical mass of interest, I will plan to open up registration for a third workshop, possibly as soon as May.

Scholarships:

If you want to participate but can’t afford the fees, please email me and I will try to accommodate you. I plan to offer at least two scholarships for active participants.

That’s all for now. Happy New Year. Hope to see you soon.

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I.

In the winter of 1959-1960, antisemitic graffiti began cropping up with alarming speed: first in West Germany, before spreading across Western Europe as well as to New York, South America, and Australia. In what would come to be known as the “international swastika outbreak,” offensive slogans and iconography appeared on shop windows, synagogue walls, and gravestones. Hundreds of incidents were recorded across four continents, leading some to wonder how antisemitism could possibly be experiencing such a robust resurgence so soon after the Holocaust.

In fact, the rash of swastikas turned out to have been the work of a KGB misinformation plot intended to sow discord between West Germany and its allies in Europe and the United States. To the contemporary observer, the details may be different, but the pattern is familiar: the cynical use of antisemitism as a blunt political instrument. Yet as Mark Mazower argues in his lucid and timely new book, On Antisemitism: A Word In History, it’s not only that antisemitism has been used as a wedge, but that, over the last several decades, it has been largely redefined to serve as a smokescreen. “A term,” he writes,

that began as a way to describe the hostility faced by Jews as a minority struggling for their legal rights is now used to defend a Jewish majority state depriving the minority within it of theirs. Fighting antisemitism once meant battling ethnonationalism; now it often justifies ethnonationalism’s excesses.

Thus, in the aftermath of last week’s horrific shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, a massacre that left fifteen Jews dead and many more wounded, it was unsurprising that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response was to blame his Australian counterpart for the attack, claiming that his “call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.” Days later, of course, the world would learn that the shooters were inspired not by any particular enthusiasm for Palestinian liberation but by ISIS, which, while wholly antisemitic, views Hamas as an enemy to be vanquished in its quest to establish an Islamic Caliphate. But such details are not Bibi’s concern.

If many are exhausted by the perpetual drone of antisemitism discourse, they may have Israeli leadership to blame. Through a decades-long influence campaign, Israel and its allies—particularly in the U.S.—have redefined the term so completely as to render it all but meaningless. This is distressing, not only because it is an affront to precise language, but because antisemitism is—according to its “classic” definition—very much resurgent. Before Bondi Beach, there was the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, and just a few months later, a shooting at another synagogue in California.1 In France, Jews have been targeted on an annual basis, whether stabbed, beaten, raped, or thrown from balconies, while synagogues are bombed and vandalized at a similar pace. And this is just a sampling. At a moment when the word antisemitism has been so overextended as to encompass everything from mass shootings to criticism of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, it is a small wonder, if still upsetting, that some otherwise boisterous voices remain silent when unequivocal acts of Jew-hatred take place: when everything is antisemitic, nothing is.

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II.

As a professor at Columbia University, Mazower was an eye-witness to the student protest movement that followed Hamas’ brutal attack of October 7th, 2023 and the IDF’s catastrophic response. As such, he had a front row seat to the ways in which definitions of antisemitism were contorted to stamp out dissent. His book is an essential resource for those curious to understand how we arrived at this Orwellian moment, in which Israel—the purported safe haven of the Jews—links arms with far-Right, authoritarian regimes whose antisemitism is an open secret, while German Jews have found themselves arrested for protesting the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza. More than that, On Antisemitism offers a sober corrective to many common misconceptions about the term, as well as a passionate riposte to its abuse.

Mazower locates the birth of political antisemitism in late-19th century Europe within the context of, on the one hand, then nascent conceptions of the nation-state (and concomitant expressions of ethnonationalism), and on the other, the emancipation of European Jewry. “The goal of antisemitic political parties in the 1870s,” he argues, was not so much to convince people of the veracity of negative stereotypes about Jews, which were already commonly held, but rather to convince people “that the Jews were a serious threat to their core social or political concerns.

[A]ntisemitism was… a movement of the new mass politics, reaching out to sectors of the population such as peasants, students, and artisans who were only now… emerging as actors on the national stage. If emancipation was an achievement gained through the work of intellectuals and elites, antisemitism was a kind of potential uprising from below, a hint perhaps that a democratic future held a darker side.

While antisemitic political parties soon fizzled out, the animus that fueled them would remain, finding its most sinister expression in the regime of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Eighty years later, the dark side of populism is once again ascendant, with a rotating cast of scapegoats: here, trans people; there, immigrants; here, again, the Jews.

Before the Second World War there had been robust debate in Jewish circles about the character of—or need for—a potential state, but the Holocaust tipped the scales in favor of those who advocated for statehood in the Holy Land. Still, it wasn’t until the Six-Day War in 1967 that diaspora Jews in the United States began to cement their attachment to Israel (the belated “Zionization” of American Jewry), and not until the 1973 Yom Kippur War that Israel began aggressively to leverage the memory of the Holocaust—once seen as a shame to be buried and forgotten—in order to indoctrinate American Jews into the idea that, but for Israel, another Shoah could happen at any time. Prime Minister Menachem Begin invoked the Nazis constantly, leading Roger Rosenblatt to write in Time: “At what point does a devotion to history cease to be a weapon against present and future error and begin to cripple those who seek its protection?”2

Worse than a pathological devotion to the past is its distortion. As Mazower notes, the tendency to elide Arab enmity for Zionism, on the one hand, with Arab antisemitism or sympathy with Nazism, on the other, is ahistorical. While supporters of Israel frequently trot out, as an example of the latter, the Mufti of Jerusalem’s strategic embrace of the Third Reich, many wartime Arab observers were either neutral or sympathetic to the Allied cause. “The Alexandria Protocol that preceded the formation of the Arab League,” Mazower writes,

noted with regret “the woes which had been inflicted upon the Jews in Europe,” but insisted that their question should not be confused with that of Zionism, because it would be unjust to solve the problem of the Jews by inflicting injustice on the Palestinian Arabs.

Antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories, all but absent from Palestine through the war years, were imported (via Europe) only after the 1948 nakba, and indeed began to crop up in post-war Islamic movements like Hamas. Still, it is essential that observers of the conflict in the Middle East understand that the root issue is one of real estate, not irrational hatred of the Jews.

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As Israel grew from a motley collection of emigrés fleeing European antisemitism into a powerful if tiny nation that was increasingly repressive toward the Palestinian population, some of its admirers, particularly those steeped in anti-colonial thought, grew disenchanted with the fledgling state. Among these were black civil rights activists who only years before had worked closely with Jewish allies to organize rallies and marches in support of the landmark legislation that passed in 1964 and 1965. The subsequent collapse of black-Jewish solidarity, Mazower argues, would lead Jewish activists to turn their efforts inward, abandoning (at the institutional level) the cause of universal human rights, and focusing instead on the liberation of Jews languishing in the Soviet Union.

III.

With the success of this campaign, which would see more than 1.3 million Soviet Jews resettled in Israel and another 500,000 elsewhere, the last substantial diaspora population facing routine prejudice had been liberated. Jewish institutions whose raison d’être was to combat antisemitism needed a new target, and a new “anti-antisemitism” campaign was born, oriented around redefining the term so as to become synonymous with criticism of Israel. “A new level of coordinated international mobilization around the issue was soon visible,” writes Mazower, “thanks to the backing [of] US politicians and diplomats who folded the fight against antisemitism into their democracy-promotion efforts around the world.” In 2004, he continues,

the US Congress passed the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, obligating the State Department to report on antisemitism around the world… Not only did this imply that antisemitism had become institutionalized as a foreign policy matter of state, but the law stated that the term antisemitism now encompassed ‘vilification of Israel,’ thereby suggesting that American diplomats had an obligation to act on behalf of another nation… Fighting antisemitism no longer meant combating racial prejudice; now it could also mean fighting back against critics of Israeli policies.

(emphasis mine)

A dozen years later, the little known International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) would adopt a “working definition” of antisemitism that is worth quoting here in full, for as is often said, sometimes the best disinfectant is sunlight:

A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

Mazower does not mince words in his assessment of this tortured bit of writing:

Using nearly three times as many words as the OED, the IHRA says less and does so less clearly… Indeterminate, repetitive, and incomplete… the IHRA definition is poorly crafted and not really a definition at all.

The ambiguity and imprecision of the IHRA formula is made worse by hypothetical and conditional examples that follow—such as the application of “double standards [to Israel] by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”—which only serve to further confuse matters. As Mazower observes,

the chief criticism of Israel today from the international community is not of this kind. It stems not from holding it to a different standard from other democratic states but from applying the same standard…

Despite its incoherence, the IHRA working definition has been adopted in some form by more than forty countries, including the United States. Its wide embrace might lead the conspiracy-minded antisemite to ask if this isn’t the work of shadowy Jewish power. But if early left-wing critics dismissed antisemitism as a “socialism of fools,” today’s observers might dismiss it as a “foreign policy of fools.” That is to say, an explanation for international fealty to Israel that relies on antisemitic conspiracy theories is the fool’s alternative to confronting the truth in an increasingly multipolar world: it’s all about the fossil fuels, baby. Or, as Secretary of State Alexander Haig put it in 1981, “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk… and is located in a critical region for American national security.” A thorough analysis of Western strategic interests in the Middle East is beyond the remit of Mazower’s book; suffice it to say here that an increasingly tortured alliance with Israel allows the U.S. a critical geographic foothold against the axis of Russia and Iran.

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IV.

For those who struggle to distinguish anti-Zionism from antisemitism, Mazower’s invocation of the work of political scientist Peter Beattie may be useful. Beattie has categorized the reasons that people may have—aside from harboring antisemitic views—for being critical of Israel. There is Third World solidarity, “not in my name”-ism (common among U.S. taxpayers), and, perhaps most common, basic ignorance. While each of these can overlap with antisemitic views, Beattie’s research suggests that more often than not, they don’t. Meanwhile, if the IHRA formula creates more questions than it answers on the subject, an alternative framework provided by the Jerusalem Declaration is clarifying. The gap between these understandings of antisemitism—one aimed at insulating Israel from criticism, the other intended to give language to anti-Jewish hatred (while stating plainly that advocacy for Palestinian rights is not, in and of itself, an expression of racial animus)—reveals, as Mazower writes, “the possibility of a fundamental clash between the interests of Israel as defined by its political leadership and those of the Jewish diaspora.” He continues:

For the awkward truth is that concern for the flourishing of Jewish life in Europe [or the United States] is not only distinct from a policy of outlawing criticism of Israel; it may in some ways even be at cross-purposes with it.

More than a clash between interests, it is a sad reality that for many American Jews, particularly younger ones, Jewish identity in Israel—increasingly pugilistic, chauvinistic, domineering—seems utterly foreign. And yet, if some struggle to conceive of diaspora Jews as having interests independent of Israel, the 2018 Basic Law, which stipulated that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and [that] they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it,” has not helped matters.

If the new “anti-antisemitism” has failed to keep Jews safe, what will? Mazower suggests that rather than viewing anti-Jewish sentiment fatalistically, as an eternal and implacable hatred—a common attitude, but one the author demonstrates to be specious—it may be more effective to treat antisemitism “as time—and context—dependent, capable of being studied and understood and tackled.” Relatedly, he argues, we may question “the idea that antisemitism is sui generis and best tackled apart from other forms of bigotry.” There is, he continues,

long-standing empirical support for the idea that prejudice against Jews is connected to other factors, most obviously to other forms of racial prejudice. A 1964 analysis of nearly thirty years of AJC-sponsored poll data noted that ‘when hostility toward Jews showed an increase…. So did hostility toward other minorities.’ FBI statistics show a similar correlation in recent years between trends in antisemitic and other hate crimes. The practical implication is that a broad anti-racist strategy is more likely to identify the ideological roots of antisemitic violence—and hence the likely perpetrators—than an approach taking antisemitism in isolation.

But this is easier said than done at a time when some progressive organizations seem incapable of acknowledging that antisemitism is not strictly a right-wing problem. Complicating these efforts further—and coming full circle—is the fact that the American Right has used the specter of left-wing antisemitism to extort universities while silencing critics of Israel, and, in some instances, detaining and deporting them. If there is to be a meaningful reckoning about actual antisemitism on the Left, it will require a steadfast refusal to lump criticism of Israel into the basket of Jew hatred.

Hours before the attack at Bondi Beach, I was on stage with the San Antonio Philharmonic singing “October 1st, 1939 / Port of Hamburg,” in which my grandmother’s escape from Germany serves as a cautionary tale against the perpetuation of bigotry and xenophobia:

She held her breath until
At last they’d got across,
But they weren’t allowed to dock,
All because the country didn’t want
To let those people through.
Ain’t that a familiar tune?
I have to sing it back to you.

Scrolling through social media on a predawn flight home the next morning, I was unsurprised by how little was being said about the shooting that had just taken place. For many who support the struggle for Palestinian freedom and self-determination, the double-standard in mainstream media—in which Jewish suffering is given pride of place, often at the expense of the dehumanization and terror to which Palestinians are daily subjected—is understandably galling. But the solution is not to mete out our compassion stingily. Our grief need not—ought not—be contingent. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the same coin. Withholding our sense of sadness and outrage at the senseless loss of human life—whether Palestinian, Jewish, Christian, or other—does not bring us closer to seeing those prejudices dismantled.

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Earlier this year, I stopped streaming music. Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine, an essential exposé on Spotify and its cynical business practices, had something to do with my decision. But as I wrote earlier this fall, it wasn’t just the ethics of streaming that bothered me. It was also the realization that I’d become a terribly distracted listener: with 100 million or more songs beckoning to me—a mere flick of the finger away—I always had the nagging feeling that there was something else I might be listening to.

But in the six-ish months since I shut down my Tidal account, I’ve experienced a renaissance in my listening habits. It brings me back to my adolescence, to the glory days of Tower Records and evening walks down Massachusetts Avenue during my freshman year of college, a bag full of musical spoils swinging loosely at my side. I’d ride the elevator to my dorm room and giddily tear the plastic off whatever I was most excited about, pop a disc into my five-CD changer (1999, baby!) and sit on the sagging bed, poring over liner notes.

Today, vinyl and digital purchases have replaced the plastic jewel cases of yore, but the excitement I harbor for new albums—and my tendency to listen to them repeatedly—reminds me of how I listened as a teenager. What follows are eleven records I fell in love with this year. To be clear, this is not a “best of” list. Art is not hierarchical, and beyond that, I know that there are dozens if not hundreds of brilliant records that simply did not cross my desk. Everything that appears is available on Bandcamp, which, for now, is the most ethical platform as far as artist compensation goes. If you’re curious about an album, I encourage you to purchase it. And now, without further ado: here, in no particular order, are my picks for 2025.

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Wednesday - Bleeds

Karly Hartzman is a freaky poet of the porch, the Pepsi can pipe, the middle school dance hall. Her language is vivid and brutally efficient: “Went to a party in the county / Stokin’ bonfires with leaf blowers / He got you in the back of his car / Just your sneakers and your drawers,” she sings on “Townies” in a voice that is aching, tremulous, even uncontrolled. But her intention never falters. From a dense cloud of guitar feedback and pulsing thwacks on a floor tom, Bleeds begins with an urgency that is relentless through its dozen songs. On the opening cut, “Reality TV Argument Bleeds,” intricate guitar counterpoint makes an otherwise raucous chorus genteel, while “Phish Pepsi” finds a snare drum shuffle underpinning a midnight Mixolydian chant (“Rode my bike drunk off of a Four Loko”). Hartzman has drunk up every tradition in her midst: it’s as if Gillian Welch had a lovechild with Steven Malkmus, Weezer, and your uncle’s favorite metal band. The offspring is a true original.

billy woods - GOLLIWOG

“It’s a dark road, but it ain’t no accidents/ No coincidences, it’s all praxis,” raps billy woods a few lines into his irresistible nightmare of an LP, GOLLIWOG. On the surface, those lines might describe strategic disinvestment in marginalized communities, but the couplet also sums up woods’ obsessive lyrical precision: nothing is left to chance in this epic that ties British colonialism and American imperialism to the tropes of the horror film genre. The album opens with a collage of found sounds: first, the whir of a film projector, then a series of eerie pitched sweeps, and finally a celesta whose plodding major chords are downright chilling—the rictus grin of a clown who’s about to murder you. If you scare easily, leave a light on while you listen.

Jason Moran - Go to Your North

The myth of the lone genius is among the the most enduring (and unhelpful) stories we tell about artists: a solitary figure goes into the studio or the writing hut to battle with the blank page and later emerges victorious, having single-handedly wrestled a masterpiece into the world. If ours is an era that reveres individualism at the expense of community, Jason Moran’s Go to Your North is an album that pushes back. It is, instead, an object lesson in communal effort.

To be sure, Moran is a singularly brilliant artist. But what is achieved here, in collaboration with the bassist and arranger Ole Morten Vågan and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, elevates ten of Moran’s tunes in gloriously unexpected ways. On the opener “Foot Under Foot,” horn backgrounds emerge like a thunderhead that appears suddenly in an otherwise halcyon sky. On “Skitter In,” a brash shout-chorus dissolves into an extraterrestrial duet for voice and electronics, with the band sampled (live?), chopped up and quite literally skittering. Meanwhile, the epic “Wind,” which closes the album, moves from delicate chamber music to unhinged free improvisation before settling into a valedictory groove. In the end, groove gives way to a sublime coda whose harmonies wouldn’t be out place in the chamber music of Olivier Messiaen or Morton Feldman.

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Hand Habits - Blue Reminder

If you’ve ever wondered what the lovechild of LA’s Laurel Canyon scene and ‘70s AM radio might sound like, Hand Habits’ sixth studio album might be it. A creative vehicle for singer-songwriter Meg Duffy, who moonlights as the guitarist for Perfume Genius, Hand Habits’ latest effort is lousy with earworms and ear candy. On song after song, Duffy unleashes hooks that lodge pleasurably in the brain, while the drum and guitar tones are to die for—the latter thanks in no small part to the work of engineer-producer Joseph Lorge, whom readers of this newsletter may know as my longtime co-conspirator on projects like Book of Travelers and Magnificent Bird. As the record progresses, the safe-ish territory of traditional pop song architecture gives way to the weird, with cameos from saxophonist Joshua Johnson nudging the music toward the experimental scene typified by L.A. stalwarts like Jeff Parker and Anna Butterss. A great album for a drive up the coast.

Chris Thile - Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Volume 2

When Punch Brothers frontman Chris Thile recorded the first volume of his Bach compendium, it was, to be honest, a little bit too perfect. No one has a better (rhythmic) pocket than Thile, and he seemed to be gunning to prove that Bach could be played, for the most part, without leaving the grid. There were long stretches that were thrilling, and it was pristinely recorded, but I’ll confess to having spent little time with the album. More than a decade later, he’s returned with an approach that is spontaneous, free, and unbearably moving. The other night, I listened to the C Major Sonata with my family in our living room and cried, silently, for about twenty minutes straight. For listeners who’ve not read about the album — as I didn’t before giving it a spin — I encourage you to just put the damn thing on. It will shock you. In my estimation, this album documents an artist who has come into full maturity. Thile knows who he is, and has been able to convey effortlessly, through his playing and the environments in which he recorded, a kind of personal credo: that music can be at once a humble social act while achieving god-like profundity and technical prowess.

Carla Kihlstedt - 26 little deaths

Carla Kihlstedt is a musical titan of our time, or, as my pal Chris Thile would say, she is a “hero friend.” Equally fierce as a singer, violinist, and composer, she found inspiration for 26 little deaths in Edward Gorey’s celebrated alphabet book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies. But where Gorey’s book is unrelentingly macabre (each page features a couplet describing the ghastly death of a child), Carla’s songs — one for each page of the book — are full of light and wonder. As she articulated during a recent performance of the piece, it’s as much a work about curiosity and imagination as it is about death.

For this project, she farmed out about half of the orchestrations—the piece is scored for an ensemble of a dozen players—to close friends and collaborators, all of whom are splendid arrangers. But don’t let that fool you: Carla’s own gifts as an orchestrator are top shelf and on display throughout the album. The world is better for having a recording of this work—hailed earlier this year by as a masterpiece—by Milwaukee-based new music outfit, Present Music, which commissioned and premiered the piece.

Linda May Han Oh (featuring Ambrose Akinmusire and Tyshawn Sorey) - Strange Heavens

What I love most about this album is the opportunity to hear the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey in modes radically different than the ones most often on display in their own work. Both are formidable composers with highly distinctive voices, but where 2024’s impeccable Owl Song found Akinmusire searching for a meditative, even anti-virtuosic ideal, his work on Strange Heavens is highly combustible. Meanwhile, to listen to any of Sorey’s recent concert music, which brings ruthless discipline to the pursuit of stillness, and then hear him simply Lay The Shit Down on a track like “Noise Machinery” is pure joy. Oh has written tunes that are deceptively simple and wildly generous: they’re great vehicles for her collaborators, and it’s astonishing how much color and invention she’s able to draw from a chordless trio. And yeah, she grooves hard, too.

Joshua Burnside - Teeth of Time

With music journalism on life support, it’s harder than ever to find out about new music. I feel fortunate, then, that a buddy texted me about a month ago with a link to the Irish singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside’s latest album, Teeth of Time. While the songs keep one foot in the realm of traditional folk music, the other foot is wayward, giving rise to electronics, noise, and found sound. To wit, the LP opens with what I presume to be an archival recording of a 1980s ad for a water bed system, narrated by a man with a thick Boston accent. In the same tune (the title track, “Teeth of Time/Mountain”), it’s unclear whether the appearance of a fiddle is played or sampled—it’s like breakbeat meets trad music. Burnside’s voice is rich with texture; in vocal quality he reminds me a bit of his American counterpart, Sam Amidon, another singer who manages to balance a reverence for the past with a bold vision for the future of folk music.

Qasim Naqvi - endling

Call me old-fashioned, but I love acoustic music. When I hear the words “modular synthesis,” a little part of me dies inside. Enter Qasim Naqvi, who has effectively cured me of this reactionary tendency. Endling is 100% modular synthesis, no acoustic instruments need apply. But in Naqvi’s hands, the synthesizer sounds deeply human. This record, in fact, moved me to tears. It was only after I’d given it a first spin that I read about Naqvi’s programmatic intent. From the album description on Bandcamp:

An endling is the final member of a species.
When an endling dies, the species is extinct…

In Naqvi’s own words, the album tells the story of the last human being on the planet – the endling – across its eight compositions.

It’s a testament to the emotional depth of the music that I understood his theme without prior explanation. Indeed, with this ravishing body of work, Naqvi mourns the self-destructive nature of humanity, contemplating its possible end, and also its eventual rebirth.

Deerhoof - Noble and Godlike in Ruin

Like Naqvi’s endling, Deerhoof’s twentieth studio album, Noble and Godlike in Ruin, is preoccupied with the end of humanity. “Love to all my beautiful savages,” Satomi Matsuzaki sings at the beginning of the album: a lament, a plea, a eulogy. As ever, Deerhoof’s songs live on a knife’s edge of pristine construction and visceral danger. In these tunes, harmony and rhythm are stable just long enough to create an expectation that the band then smashes to bits through sly chromaticism and sudden meter shifts. But as always, Deerhoof makes it all feel inevitable. In the closer “Immigrant Songs,” Matsuzaki is “dreaming of a melody that goes up / a song about love.” The track is gradually overwhelmed by noise, and the final three minutes of the album sound like nothing so much as the end of the world.

Ambrose Akinmusire - honey from a winter stone

What is the future of American music? If I had to put my eggs in one basket, I might choose the basket of Ambrose Akinmusire, a musician of endless poise, curiosity, and pathos. On honey from a winter stone, he continues his search for new forms, bringing together pianist Sam Harris, drummer Justin Brown, synth goddess Chiquitamagic, Mivos Quartet, and the m.c. Kokayi. One of the most remarkable things about the album is how little Akinmusire plays. As a result, every entrance of his trumpet feels like an event. And even once he joins the party, he delivers considered bon mots rather than hogging the spotlight with unending monologues. As always is the case with the trumpeter, color and timbre convey as much emotional information as do the notes themselves: there are creaks and croaks, yelps and whispers, long tones and stutters. But just as soon as Akinmusire announces his presence, he ghosts, leaving his brilliant collaborators to shine.

In a press release, Akinmusire said that “this album is about the fears and struggles I personally face, as well as those many Black men endure: colorism, erasure, and the question of who gets to speak for my community, and why.” At a time when so much political art feels ham-fisted or weighed down by ideology, like honey from a winter stone wears its politics with as much subtlety and complexity as does each bar of music. Akinmusire is on a quest for something, and it’s a pleasure to be an observer on that ride.

A few other albums I really dug this year: The Westerlies - Paradise, Jeff Tweedy - Twilight Override, Ted Hearne & The Crossing - Farming, Miguel Zenón Quartet - Vanguardia Subterránea, Chris Weisman - Lightly, Madison Cunningham - Ace, Geese - Getting Killed.

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Finally, a little plea: I had originally intended to paywall this post, having realized that it’s tough to maintain the pace of publishing I’d like to achieve here without a bit more compensation for my labor. About 150 of the 5,000 folks who receive this newsletter have paid subscriptions. I realize that for some of you, spending money on a bi-weekly blog may be either unaffordable or a poor use of your disposable income. I totally get it. But if you’re a longtime reader with a little cash to burn, I’d be most grateful for your support. In the end, I decided not to put a paywall on this missive because I really want all of you to discover some of the music I heard this year. I hope you enjoy it.

I’m in San Antonio this week doing a program with the Philharmonic that includes Heirloom, featuring my dad; If love will not swing wide the gates, featuring clarinetist Anthony McGill; a few songs of mine (I’ll sing); and a ditty called Rhapsody in Blue by up-and-comer George Gershwin. Then it’s home to Portland for six weeks of writing and recording. I hope to see some of you on the East Coast in February, when I’ll have a lot going on. Til soon…

In Iowa City, where slate skies and plunging temperatures augur the arrival of winter, students clutch the collars of their coats, weighed down by backpacks and cell phones and the anxiety that seems to haunt so many young people these days. (Okay, not just young people.) I’m in residence this week at the university here, and a few days ago, I had an opportunity to visit three sections of a class called Performing Power, which is concerned with the intersection of art and social justice. These conversations with students were illuminating, offering a window into what it’s like for young adults to come of age in an era of perpetual crisis and chaos. But they also had questions of their own, and one that came up several times was this: what, they wanted to know, do I believe to be the responsibility of the artist/activist in a time like ours?

When we talk about art and politics, we often think of works that carry an ideological message. Some are subtle; others are polemical broadsides. A healthy artistic ecosystem will contain all of these and more: an ecology of diverse aesthetic and strategic approaches to the political. But since making a polemic of my own back in 2018—the oratorio emergency shelter intake form, which (loudly) confronts economic inequality through the lens of housing crises—I’ve come to embrace a different tack on political art, one which centers social relations.

More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the extent to which love, and more specifically, Christian love, or agape, was a disciplining force in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In the face of bombings, beatings, and garden variety dehumanization, movement leaders of that era resisted giving into hatred, for they knew that to do so was to demean themselves. This wasn’t easy work, and Dr. King writes about moments in which he failed to live up to the standard he’d set for himself: to love his neighbor-enemy the way that God loves man. I’ve written several times this year about Dr. King’s commitment to agape, observing that contemporary politics seems comparatively devoid of an ethic of love, that it is driven instead, for the most part, by contempt, resentment, grievance, and tribalism. While many readers seem to have appreciated this call to “love one’s enemies” as Dr. King advocated, others were skeptical.

Some of the skeptics long to embrace King’s philosophy of the Beloved Community, but consider it naive given this year’s calamitous descent, here in the United States, into authoritarianism, with its assaults on the press and freedom of speech; the weaponization of the (so-called) Justice Department; and ICE’s extrajudicial kidnappings of immigrants, which, conducted in broad daylight, have terrorized communities throughout the United States. How, they ask, can we love our enemies when our neighbors are being snatched from street corners? Others reject the premise entirely. They believe that half the country has embraced, passively or actively, a white nationalist politics, and that those people are not worthy of our grace, curiosity, forgiveness, humility, or love. On the surface, this seems reasonable. But I think it’s misguided, and symptomatic of what the Duke University sociologist Chris Bail and others call “false polarization.”

Bail has spent much of his career studying why it is that people come to hate each other. At Duke, he founded the Polarization Lab, where he conducts research related to—you guessed it—political polarization. In his book Breaking the Social Media Prism, Bail describes a number of studies that he and his colleagues have led in an effort to better understand the role that our digital paradigm plays in fueling polarization. One of his team’s most crucial findings is that social media does not polarize so much as it increases our perception of polarization. Broadly speaking, the most prominent voices on social media are the most ideologically extreme, while those with more nuanced views are either crowded out by algorithms, or simply don’t get involved. (Bail’s research suggests that those with more nuanced views tend to remain silent on social media because they fear being attacked by those on the extreme ends of the political spectrum.) The more time we spend on social media, he concludes, the more likely we are to perceive the country as being more polarized than it actually is. On most major policy issues, he argues, Americans’ beliefs have not shifted much in decades.

I find the concept of false polarization oddly heartening. If we’re less polarized than social media would have us believe, then it stands to reason that powering down our devices and simply talking to people face to face may be a more significant political act than we might otherwise have thought. But it’s not just about talking to people with whom we might disagree. It’s also about shifting our approach to those conversations, and recognizing that the “message” of social media, to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s framework, is one of conflict. Tech oligarchs are driven by the profit motive, and conflict has been shown to keep people locked into their feeds, furiously typing ripostes in the flame war du jour; more time spent arguing on social media platforms means more money flowing into Silicon Valley’s coffers.

When we recognize this tendency — that the default mode of social media discourse is one that centers conflict and division, and that this orientation has metastasized beyond the internet — we can make a concerted effort to approach our interactions on and offline from a different place: one in which we begin from a stance of curiosity, humility, compassion, and a desire to identify shared values. All of this requires a willingness to listen.

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As many have observed, Zohran Mamdani’s first viral campaign video was extraordinary not because of what he said, but because of how little he spoke at all. Instead, that video showed him listening to his fellow New Yorkers as they recounted who they’d voted for in the 2024 election, and why. Whether or not you believe Mamdani is a generational political talent, we can all learn from his gift for listening. (It’s all the more remarkable that he’s such a good listener given that Mamdani also has the gift of the gab.)

When I posted a link to that early campaign video on one of my social media accounts toward the end of 2024, the comments I received were disheartening, yet predictable. Rather than validate the lived experience that led these New Yorkers to vote in the way they did, many commenters were utterly dismissive. They variously insulted the intelligence of these voters, suggested that they deserved whatever befell them under a second Trump presidency, or offered wonky statistical claims about why the Biden presidency had actually benefited these folks, regardless of what they felt.

By contrast, what I took away from that video was a refreshing reminder that there are no monoliths in American politics. This rhymes with recent conversations I’ve had with strangers, none of whom would fit neatly into the ideological boxes we so often use to enclose and flatten our alleged political opponents.

That flattening of the body politic was on display in the now mythic (and amply critiqued) conversation, in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. While I was glad that these two thinkers engaged in debate after Coates had taken Klein to task for allegedly whitewashing Kirk’s legacy, I was frustrated by the conversation itself, and the discourse surrounding it. For those who didn’t listen, its animating question concerned who we ought (or ought not) engage in political debate or persuasion. Where Klein advocated for a bigger tent with fewer ideological purity tests, Coates was resolutely unwilling to put forward any theory of power. But I found that in their framing of the debate, both Klein and Coates were guilty of reducing the body politic to a binary caricature in which the nation has been cleaved neatly in two (false polarization!), with one half on the side of universal human rights, and the other salivating over a platform of white nationalist paleo-conservatism. In this view, Klein was seen as advocating for throwing marginalized constituencies under the bus in order to win elections, while Coates, eschewing strategy, spoke forcefully for the idea that those who stand on the side of dehumanization can’t be reasoned with. (How does he think the 1964 Civil Rights Act got passed?)

But the reality is that people’s beliefs are fluid, and, more than that, they are often rife with contradiction. The problem then, is not whether we subject members of our political coalitions to purity tests, but the notion that any of us is pure, that our beliefs are coherent, or that we don’t have something to learn from our neighbors’ experience of the world. And this brings me back to the question of art and politics, and what the artist-citizen may do at a time of extreme (perceived) polarization.

One of art’s most hallowed roles is its function as an equalizer. It may remind us that we are all mortal bags of water harboring dreams, disappointments, toothaches, unrequited crushes, or irresponsibly large credit card balances. A song can do this when the specific reveals itself to be universal. A song (or a play or a poem or a dance) can also draw us back into the deep core of our emotional selves, and away from the petty concerns and resentments that follow us in our daily lives. But the attention that we bring to the spaces in which we perform, the way we engage an audience, the physical layout of the space, these, too, can also serve to make us aware of each other’s humanity.

Last night, Attacca Quartet and I gave a brief performance for a few hundred donors who support the performing arts series, programmed by the visionary curator Aaron Greenwald, at University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium. It’s an enormous hall with 1800 seats, and Aaron began, a few seasons ago, to put the audience on stage for a number of performances, capping crowds at around 200. Not only does this give him the flexibility to feature artists who aren’t box office juggernauts; it also permits him to design a social encounter in the way that the audience sees each other—literally and spiritually—in the course of a performance. For these “Up Close” concerts, bleacher seating is arranged on three sides of the stage, with two groups of audience members facing each other.

It’s one thing to have an emotional response to a piece of music. It’s another to see someone visibly moved sitting across from you, and to witness in their emotional catharsis a part of yourself. If our digital media landscape, in amplifying the most extreme ideological voices in our society, has created a sense of false polarization, then perhaps live performance can and should do the opposite. If you want a spicy polemic, go have a scroll on X or Bluesky. But if you really want to change the world, create an invitation for your neighbor, a stranger, an ideological opponent, to see herself in you, in your work, and in their fellow audience members. When we sit side by side or across from one another, regarding a work of art, we may catch a glimpse of a society in which we recognize and honor the fact that all of our fates are intertwined.

Tonight, November 20th, I perform with Attacca Quartet in Iowa City. On Sunday and Monday, November 23rd and 24th, I perform with my father in Washington, D.C. Complete tour dates are here. As always, thank you for reading. If you can’t upgrade to a paid subscription, simply clicking like or share helps to grow the audience of this newsletter.

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Land of enchantment, razor wire, chain link fence, air traffic control tower, freeway overpasses in terracotta and baby blue, mountains drawn up into the haze, Jermaine Stewart’s 1986 hit “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off,” malpractice law billboards, chaparral, stubby trees, airstream dealership, virgin grasslands, motels that long to be photographed by William Eggleston, Cracker Barrel, Denny’s, La Quinta Inn, TD’s Show Club Promises XXX Entertainment, in the shuttle from Albuquerque to Santa Fe there is a man who reeks of liquor but holds it well while making inquiries to the bike rental agency (I’d like a 17-inch frame, he says politely); guest houses, key cards, coffee cups, coffee shops, soundcheck, interminable stretches of Illinois farmland, dead deer on the shoulder, rental car receipts, reverb, exurbs, wedding party in the hotel lobby, parking validation tickets, concert halls, 5am packing ritual with attendant twinge of sadness (goodbye drab hotel room), merch table conversations, misplaced cables, detritus of double chocolate muffins, detritus of ill-advised 1am pizza, deep gradient Ohio sunsets; airports, airy terminals, airline loyalty lounges, uninspiring breakfast spreads, bible-black coffee, track-suited executives sipping 9am flutes of Prosecco, emails against the thrum of 8-bit dance music, boarding announcements, collective yawns, regional jets, takeoff and landing, cloud cover, sandstone, shale, iron oxide, ochre & azure over Utah;

a mid-flight conversation with a frozen food warehouse inspector who 1), voted for Donald Trump three times yet 2), remains on Elizabeth Warren’s email list (she has some sensible ideas) while 3), calling Barack Obama the great divider, and still 4), thinks the ICE raids are abhorrent, that we are a nation of immigrants, so many of whom come to this country (he says) willing to do labor that native-born U.S. citizens won’t do; school drop-off, first rain of the season, bedtime routine, one more book, papa, taco Tuesday, the airport again; landing at La Guardia, wrestling too many pieces of luggage out of the taxi and dragging them roughshod over the concrete into yet another hotel lobby, walks around the old neighborhood, rusted sign for the foot clinic and the memory of an ingrown toenail surgically removed there (tmi?), well-rested middle-aged parents ambling through the door of the overpriced bakery balancing baguettes and cappuccinos on the backs of designer prams, babies in dinosaur costumes, babies in crocodile costumes, babies a reminder of an earlier phase of parenthood, dinner with a close friend (newly married), inscribing books (wedding gifts) by candlelight, Halloween, mural of a flock of birds flying above the roof of a brownstone painted onto the side of a luxury apartment building, terrible traffic, sensory overload (counterpoint of excavators), FDR Drive closed for construction, rehearsing delicate string quartet arrangements in a ramshackle studio while the kick drum of next door’s electro-pop band jackhammers relentlessly, a foot of water courtesy of flash flooding, more traffic, new songs, forgotten lyrics, moments of catharsis, mother of the bride in the elevator after the show, a flight canceled, run-in with an old friend during a layover in Salt Lake City, another mid-flight conversation, this time with a retired flight attendant, Austrian by birth but raised in Alabama, now a member of the Raging Grannies (she protests weekly at the ICE facility in Portland), a lover of classical music with strong opinions about conductors; landing gear deployed, the sea-glass blue Prius appears outside baggage claim, then finally home.

Next week I’ll be in residence at University of Iowa, where I’ll perform with Attacca Quartet. The following week I’m in D.C. with my father. Complete tour dates are here.

You can pick up a copy of Heirloom here. Gramophone Magazine calls it “a musical roller coaster of a journey bursting with drama, detail, and invention... With pianist Kahane senior in top form, and conductor Eric Jacobsen and The Knights’ orchestral collective alive to the concerto’s every twist and turn, here is a dazzling concerto du jour that glows with an exhilarating sense of its own clear purpose and inevitability.”

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That’s right, folks.1 Today is the day. Tremendous labor and resources went into making this puppy; I’d be delighted if you were to give it a listen and/or pick up a copy on vinyl, CD, or in digital format. 

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ICYMI, here’s some recent writing of mine that’s attracted a few eyeballs:

are you listening

A Love Letter to Music Listings (The Atlantic)

modest needs, lavishly met

I promise I will be back with some proper writing very soon. Meanwhile, tour continues tonight in San Francisco. This Sunday in Los Angeles is sold out, but tickets remain for my shows in New York City (10/31) and Portland, OR (11/4), where I’ll be joined by a full band in the premiere of a passel of new songs. Tickets & more information for all dates can be found here.

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Sometimes I forget that this Substack represents the evolution of what was once a monthly newsletter that served up the skinny on upcoming gigs. I’m at work on a couple of essays on various topics, but what with the vagaries of [gestures clumsily at the world], they’re slow-going. In the meantime, I write from Santa Fe, New Mexico, with its intoxicating morning light, to give you a heads up about what’s in store this month.

On Sunday, October 5th, I’m singing/playing/conducting alongside Santa Fe Pro Musica, a crack chamber orchestra led by Colin Jacobsen. On the first half, Colin will lead the Dvorak Serenade for Strings; on the second half, I’m singing a handful of songs before conducting If love will not swing wide the gates, a clarinet concerto I’ve written for Anthony McGill. We’ve had two rehearsals so far, and I’m pleased to report that, if only momentarily, my crushing sense of imposter syndrome as a conductor has abated. Anthony and the band sound great; tickets to Sunday’s performance can be found here.

n.b.: New Yorkers will get a chance to hear the work at Zankel Hall next April, though that concert is very nearly sold out; the remaining tickets can be found here.

(Here’s me playing a piano reduction of the second movement.)

Next week, my father, Jeffrey Kahane, is popping up to Portland, where we’ll rehearse for a duo recital set to take place on October 10th at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre. Tickets and additional information can be found here. As it happens, our concert coincides with the release date for Heirloom, an album documenting my piano concerto of the same name. If you haven’t pre-ordered your copy, you can do so here. There are still about 20 limited edition signed prints of the first page of the score; these will accompany physical purchases of the album while supplies last.1

Then on Sunday, October 12th, I’ll play a solo concert at Healing Force of the Universe in Pasadena, California. This will be my first show on the east side of Los Angeles since 2019. The set will primarily comprise songs written in the last ten months; only a handful of tickets remain.

On October 21st, back in Portland, my Oregon Symphony conducting debut arrives in the form of a concert with indie-folk darling M. Ward, who generously invited me to arrange some of his catalog for string orchestra. He and I will play some tunes together to open the concert; we’ll be joined by twenty-odd string players for a dozen songs on the second half. Matt’s songs were a delight to explore; they are sturdy, well-built, aching, with not a word out of place: the musical equivalent of a deceptively simple but life-affirming porchetta sandwich on crusty bread. Tickets for the show, which will take place at Revolution Hall, are here.

Two quick stops in the Midwest follow — a solo concert at Denison College in Granville, Ohio (October 23, tickets here), as well as a set opening for The Bad Plus in Chicago (October 25, tickets here) — after which I head to New York City. There, I’ll be putting together my first full band show in a decade under the auspices of the 92nd Street Y, which has commissioned me to write, in essence, a new album, which I’ve provisionally titled only light can do that. On October 31st, you can be the first to hear it live, when I’ll be joined in performance by Chris Morrissey on bass, Josh Dion on drums, David Bernat and Domenic Salerni on violins, Lauren Spaulding on viola, and Arlen Hlusko on cello. Tickets and information here.

Finally, for those in Portland, I’ll be reprising only light can do that on November 4th at the Alberta Rose Theatre. There, the band will consist of Andrew Jones on bass, Matt Mayhall on drums, Greg Ewer and Ling Ling Huang on violins, Amanda Grimm on viola, and Marilyn de Oliveira on cello. This, I realize, will be my first ever full band show in my new hometown. I’d be most delighted to see you there.

In case you missed it, I have a new website, which, in addition to offering a proper catalog of my concert works, contains my complete tour dates as well as a compendium of upcoming performances of concert works that I’ve not detailed here. Have a look at your leisure.

As a little postscript: perhaps like some of you, I have followed the meta-discourse surrounding the Ezra Klein/Ta-Nehisi Coates conversation with dismay. I had been planning to write something on the subject, but , whose political sensibilities rhyme with my own, has written an essay that eloquently and passionately makes more or less the same argument that I would have made.

As always, thank you for reading, and for your support. Liking and commenting this post helps others to discover this newsletter, so smash that button if you feel so inclined.

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In the wake of the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, which only serves to perpetuate this country’s cycle of senseless violence, I have found solace in the words of our president, Donald J. Trump, who, as he stated in his second inaugural address, came into office to defend all Americans’ constitutional right to free expression. It’s so important that people carry this message forward, so I encourage you to make this song (below) your own: sing it at open mics, record a new version on social media, arrange it for your a cappella group, etc. May our nation one day find peace, justice, and prosperity for all.

And here’s a lead sheet.

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