Music

Browse our essays and reviews on music.

Gangsta Folk

If gangsta rap lyrics are evidence of criminality, what are we to make of gruesome murders depicted in many folk and country songs?

  • Simon Waxman

Loser

Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis.

  • Alan A. Stone

Hardscrabble

The novel House of Earth shows Woody Guthrie in a different light, exiled from the Dust Bowl but dreaming of it still.

  • Megan Pugh

Thrilled with the Gifts of Humans

A Conversation with Michael Zapruder

  • Dan Chelotti
  • Michael Zapruder

Square Dance

Agnes de Mille’s Beloved Community

  • Megan Pugh

Off Minor

Robin D.G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original restores the pianist and composer to the history he lived through.

  • Scott Saul

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Lastingness

How growing old shapes aesthetic vision.

  • Nicholas Delbanco

Brazil’s Dreamer

The disenchantment and re-enchantment of Chico Buarque.

  • Scott Saul

The Sound of Philosophy

Milton Babbitt and John Cage. 

  • Dmitri Tymoczko

The Sublime Beethoven

What the composer and Kant had in common.

  • Dmitri Tymoczko

Giant Steps

A review of two books on Coltrane.

  • Scott Saul

Review: Blues Legacies and Black Feminism

Invitations to danger and salvation that makes the blues the blues.

  • Jonathan Gill

The Intelligent Forty-year-old’s Guide to Rap

Rap poetry is full of cutting-edge linguistic innovations.

  • Mark Zanger

Is There a Postmodern Music?

Serialists are consolidating one of the most radical shifts in music history.

  • Arthur Berger

Trial by Jury

The world of piano competition.

  • Michael Kimmelman

Miles Davis in Retrospect

  • Michael Ullman

The Duke and His Only Son

  • Alexander Coleman

Nadia Boulanger: A Life Devoted to Music

  • Charles Fisk

Recent Books on Jazz

  • Michael Ullman

New Recordings of Charlie Parker

  • Michael Ullman

A Festschrift for “Ernst Who???”

Despite being a prolific composer, Ernst Krenek is one of the least understood musical figures of the twentieth century.

  • Glenn Gould
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