From Boccaccio’s Decameron to why we need civil justice reform in light of coronavirus, we continue to publish new essays into our Thinking in a Pandemic  project. 

But today we offer our members some escape from the news cycle with our very first music-themed reading list! Charting everything from the origins of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” to the similarities between John Cage and Milton Babbitt, our archive has musical gems from all genres, with writers as passionate about Beethoven’s sublime symphonies as they are about Bessie Smith’s blues. 

We also go all the way back to our Winter 1975 print issue with an essay by Glenn Gould—a heartfelt, hilarious commemorative to Ernst Krenek, who “despite being a prolific composer,” Gould writes, “is one of the least understood musical figures of the twentieth century.”