experimental music
The rise of cringe
No one wrote programme notes quite like the English experimentalist John White. ‘This music is top-quality trash,’ proclaims his 1993…
The unnerving world of Erik Satie’s 20-hour composition
Once Igor Levit starts playing Erik Satie at 10 a.m. on 24 April at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, he can…
What would Tanner say?
On the train home from the Royal Festival Hall I learned of the death of Michael Tanner, who wrote this…
Such sweet sorrow
We gathered on a freezing Sunday night, inside a barrel-vaulted church designed in the 1890s by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to…
Ordinary but extraordinary
How hard must it be to make music that sounds like no one else? And how unrewarding, often, as well?…
Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus: Songs of Yearning
Grade: A It has taken 33 years — during which time this decidedly strange Liverpool collective have put out only…
Read The Spectator article that gave birth to musical minimalism 50 years ago
The Spectator is responsible for many coinages. One of the most significant came in 1968, when an article by our…
If you like Schoenberg, you’ll like Björk’s Utopia
At the launch of the Christmas radio schedules last week, James Purnell, director of radio (and much more) at the…
