John Cage

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Interview and photos: Gerard Malanga

A gathering of souls
In Walt Whitman’s notebook for the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass , he writes, “Every soul has its own individual voice.” That notion rang true for photographer/poet/filmmaker Gerard Malanga as he put together “Souls,” an exhibit of 100 portraits spanning five decades.
By KRISTEN GOODFRIEND | March 31, 2010

What's new

BMOP, and the Christian Wolff festival
The timely highlight of Gil Rose’s latest BMOP (Boston Modern Orchestra Project) concert, “Strings Attached,” was a new/old piece (2004, revised 2009) for two string orchestras by Scott Wheeler now called Crazy Weather — the new title taken from a John Ashbery poem that begins, “It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having.”
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | March 23, 2010

The news from No Place

Saya Woolfalk and the feminist 'heretics'
Saya Woolfalk first grabbed people's attention around 2005, with playful-serious installations and videos in which performers masked in bright, patchwork fabric costumes of cartoon leaves and long swinging dreadlocks jumped around small rooms decorated like cartoon paradises.
By GREG COOK | March 10, 2010

2009: The year in dance

Milestones and memories
You could say there were two tremendous forces that propelled dance into the world of modern culture: the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev and the choreography of Merce Cunningham.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | December 22, 2009

Review: (Untitled)

Jonathan Parker's a little too comfortably bourgeois
Woody Allen might have passed on making this film 35 years ago because it was too dated and middlebrow.
By PETER KEOUGH | November 11, 2009

Sustainability

Merce Cunningham in the Park Avenue Armory; Christopher Wheeldon at City Center
If you wanted to know what happened at the Merce Cunningham memorial a week ago Wednesday in the Park Avenue Armory, you could get a thousand answers.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | November 04, 2009

No new age

Earthsound is for real
Yes, this Boston jazz trio incorporates the sounds of seals, tree frogs, and crickets. Yes, one of them is a working ecologist. Here's why you shouldn't hold that against them.
By JON GARELICK | September 25, 2009

No new age

Bound for greatness

An Exact Change sampler
Twenty years ago, Damon and Naomi founded Exact Change, a small publishing house (okay, a small publishing room) specializing in a wide range of near-forgotten texts from the far-flung fringes of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and other outcroppings of the 20th century avant-garde.
By MICHAEL BRODEUR | September 16, 2009

The best is noise

Howard Stelzer's tale of the tape
One night last winter, Thurston Moore and Swedish sax kingpin Mats Gustafsson popped into the Middle East upstairs for an off-the-cuff performance together. The loose group arrangement — Bill Nace and Chris Corsano joined in at the last minute — made for a thrill that you hardly ever get in rock-music circles.
By MATT PARISH | August 11, 2009

Close encounters

Keep your eye on this Bird
Laura Jacobs, who was the dance critic here at the Phoenix in the mid 1980s, is the author of Landscape with Moving Figures, a collection of writing from the New Criterion that's as polemic as it is poetic. But she's also a novelist. Like Women About Town (2002), The Bird Catcher focuses on a young woman finding her way in 21st-century Manhattan.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | August 05, 2009

Booty call!

The Huntington plunders Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance
"Ladies and gentlemen," a cheerful female voice informs the Huntington Theatre audience, "the Caribbean Light Opera Society is proud to present Pirates! (Or, Gilbert and Sullivan Plunder'd)." The governor, she continues, wants to assure us that there is almost no danger of a pirate attack during the performance.
By JEFFREY GANTZ | May 27, 2009

Wintry mix

No Triangle, Subliminal Sessions, and the New Music Festival
There are so many interesting and unusual musical happenings this week, it's almost more than this little column can bear.
By SUSANNA BOLLE | January 26, 2009

Rare Frequencies: Callithumpian Consort, Thurston Moore and Bill Nace

Louder than bombs
Although composer JOHN CAGE is best known for 4'33" of silence, he could raise a ruckus when the mood struck.
By SUSANNA BOLLE | January 20, 2009

Chance and dance

Tim Feeney + Eats Tapes
For the past three years, one of the prime centers for experimental, improvised, and new music and jazz in Boston has been the Open Sound series in Somerville.
By SUSANNA BOLLE | August 14, 2008

Post-traumatic earth

Eiko + Koma and Tere O’Connor at Concord
With the most unassertive, seemingly egoless moves, Eiko & Koma can evoke the sensations and moods of a universe.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | July 23, 2008

Playing the body electric

James Coleman brings his Theremin to the Piano Factory
Chances are, even if you’ve never seen one played, you know what a theremin sounds like.
By SUSANNA BOLLE | July 02, 2008

Text messages

CTS Dance Company’s reverent movements
Cross-pollination in the arts shows up in many media, but it is perhaps most evident in dance.
By JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ | June 04, 2008

Where the chips fell

Marjorie Morgan, Karl Cronin, Lucinda Childs, and Boston Ballet
Dance history reverberated across Boston during the past few weeks, affirming that how we live now owes a lot to how we’ve chosen to remember — and forget.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | May 28, 2008

Coachella it ain’t

The INC cometh and Cage's Variations VII
The International Noise Conference started as an acid-tongued spit take on the club-oriented Miami Winter Music Conference.
By SUSANNA BOLLE | April 15, 2008

Real to reel

The exquisite artifice and lasting weirdoid-ness of Roxy Music
Even now, after Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces and Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again , the rock-star-as-vector-of-ideas is still something of a challenge for us.
By JAMES PARKER | April 01, 2008

Classical shebang

Stephen Drury's modernity
Ain’t nothing’s free — but leave it to the troublemakers at New England Conservatory to kick that idea into last century.
By MICHAEL BRODEUR | January 22, 2008

High techno

‘Make It New’ turns three, plus Hauschka at the Goethe
A prime place to go if you wanted to hear cutting-edge and classic techno from Germany, Detroit, and beyond has been “Make It New” every Thursday at Middlesex Lounge.
By SUSANNA BOLLE | October 30, 2007

Untold tales

Bebe Miller at the ICA, Kelley Donovan at the Dance Complex
Some dances are made on specific story lines that they keep to themselves.
By MARCIA B. SIEGEL | April 26, 2007

What? Institutional? Us?

Fluxus gets the Harvard treatment
George Maciunas was the sort of artist who composed musical scores that called for hammering nails into all the keys of a piano.
By GREG COOK | March 20, 2007

Terpsichore’s delight

The joys of spring dance
Traveling troupes and local dancemakers spring up around the Boston area this season.
By DEBRA CASH | March 13, 2007

Antics ever + anon

Casco Bay Cabaret rolls around for the eighth time
Casco Bay Cabaret rollYou may have tossed out your noisemakers and extra lampshades on New Year’s Morning, but the antics of the season certainly aren’t over yet.
By MEGAN GRUMBLING | January 10, 2007

The many modes of Waits

By TED DROZDOWSKI | November 20, 2006

Talent shows

The 2006 DeCordova Annual, plus ‘Art, Theatre, and Engineering’ at MIT
Amazing but true: each year since 1989, the tireless curatorial team at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park have scoured the New England area to put together a show highlighting artists from the area.
By RANDI HOPKINS | April 28, 2006

Granduer and intimacy

Frühbeck de Burgos at the BSO, the Borromeos’ Schoenberg, BMOP at Club Café
One of the most delightful moments in Mozart comes at the very end of his Symphony No. 39 in E-flat, the first of his last trio of great symphonies.
By LLOYD SCHWARTZ | April 18, 2006