Praeterita

Earlier this month, London-based artist Milein Cosman died at the age of 96. She lived one of those lives that it's hard to imagine being duplicated: fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, learning to be an artist in post-war London, finding her way into the artistic set of the time, marrying musicologist and broadcaster Hans Keller, and having the great good fortune to spend time at rehearsals drawing some of the greatest musicians and composers of the mid-twentieth century, such as Stravinsky, Rostropovich, and Britten. Speaking as someone whose typical daily listening is (to cite yesterday's playlist alone) Beethoven's late string quartets and Schumann's Dichterliebe, I think my ideal day job would be to sit with a graphite stick and a sketchpad in the rehearsal room of, say, the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Pen and ink drawing of cellist Rostropovich She was also a skilful printmaker, and from the 1960s on was a member of the Camden Printmakers group. Lithograph o...

Rare footage of Dimitri Shostakovitch in rehearsal There are many people around the world who no doubt are looking at the USA and wondering what the hell is going on, and there people looking at Russia and thinking the same, and now we have the two countries on a collision course again due to the meshing of two authoritarians taking advantage of a sizeable lunatic bloc in their respective electorates (or "electorate", if you will).  I'm so shell-shocked by the pace of recent events that I'm having to remind myself of how much of my artistic development was shaped by the art/music/literature produced by these two countries. Every one of the people in the following lists made works that hit my like a bolt of lightning when I first encountered them, some as early as my fourteenth year. You can imagine the worlds that were opened up to me as I scoured these books (et al) while reading in an underheated bedroom in a draughty building in a mining town in the ...

I have hundreds of CDs of "classical" music, arranged alphabetically by composer on shelves in the bedroom of the Chicago apartment. My wife suggests every now and then that we move the shelves somewhere else, so I occasionally come up with schemes to justify keeping them there. My latest one is playing every CD over the course of this year, all of them in the car, because: a) I drive every day, and that's the best chance to listen to music; b) The sound system in the car is amazingly good. (In fact, I think back to the first stereo that I bought from my pocket money, in the 1970s, and the better ones that I got in my twenties, and marvel at the fact that the sound in the Toyota Corolla is better than they ever were). Note that I put the word "classical" between inverted commas. It's not a term that I particularly like, as it comes with so many assumptions, particularly from people who say they don't like that kind of music. But whatever we call it...