Andrew Katzenstein

The first thing one notices about Epirotic music from the 1920s and 1930s is that it’s raw. This isn’t just a result of the grainy quality of the recording. The singing is full-throated and passionate; the instruments keen like wolves or flutter and swoop like hummingbirds. The insistent strumming a…

A month and a half after the opening of its new building, the Whitney Museum is now hosting an eleven-day festival celebrating the work of American expatriate composer Conlon Nancarrow, who is best known for his innovative studies for player piano. Even when you don’t understand what you’re hearing,…

A month and a half after the opening of its new building, the Whitney Museum is now hosting an eleven-day festival celebrating the work of American expatriate composer Conlon Nancarrow, who is best known for his innovative studies for player piano. Even when you don’t understand what you’re hearing,…

About halfway through the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, the eponymous narrator complains, “the

Since 2016 the critic and Slavic-language scholar Gary Saul Morson has written about a number of great Russian writers and thinkers in the pages of The New York Review, including Alexander Herzen, Alexander Pushkin, Isaac Babel, Vasily Grossman, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Griboedov, and, most recently, Fyodor Dostoevsky (with a detour for Ivan the Terrible). Morson’s articles have shown how important literature is to Russian history, and explored the paradox of a nation that, as he explained in an…

In our May 12 issue, Christopher Benfey reviewed Here and There, an essay collection by the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who died in 2018. Cavell is renowned for the enormous range of his writing, on subjects including the “ordinary language” philosophy that arose from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin, the importance of Kant’s epistemology to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the use and subversion of cliché in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and the innovations of Hollywood screwball com…

In our May 12 issue, Christopher Benfey reviewed Here and There, an essay collection by the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who died in 2018. Cavell is

The cellist Abdul Wadud had a virtuosic command of many musical languages, from bebop to free jazz, chamber music, and Delta blues.