Daniel J. Kushner

On May 5, the Edelman Arts gallery on Manhattan's Upper East Side opened its sixth exhibition of works by the English-born, Berlin-based artist Christopher Winter. Comprised predominantly of acrylic-on-canvas works from 2012, the show, as its title "Unnatural History" suggests, does much to distort -- both subtly and explicitly --...

As I left the Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Festival on its closing night, Saturday, May 5, I couldn't escape the feeling that I had wasted so much time -- not at the festival itself, but long before.

I had grown up listening to music oblivious to the domineering constructs of ubiquitous...

It seems to me that one's relationship to the monolithic Opera -- with a capital "O" -- is rarely love at first sight. It's often much more akin to a slow courtship. Such was certainly the case for the three composers that comprise the core of the Experiments in Opera...

On April 3, New York City-based musician Natalie LeBrecht -- under the auspices of her solo project Greenpot Bluepot -- released the album Ascend at the Dead End, a concise yet sprawling 32 minutes of kaleidoscopic sounds and complex textures. Co-mixed by Avey Tare of Animal Collective and Matt Marinelli...

For young musicians who are called on to perform the works of contemporary composers, utilizing "extended techniques" that one might readily encounter in 20th century compositions is not unusual. Being asked to interpret music inspired by an early 19th-century American style of shape note singing called Sacred Harp is decidedly...

Composer and pianist Timothy Andres's take on the subject of demigods in art is far removed from conventional Romanticism: "We like to imagine that our artists have this kind of divine inspiration. I think if they say they do, they're probably having you on," says Andres. This steely realism seems...

As a reader of music criticism, I usually distrust blatant comparisons in record reviews, which often seem only to obscure any accurate description of the music itself. As a writer of music criticism, I try to avoid loaded juxtapositions at all costs. In the case of Seattle indie band The...

On Saturday, November 5 at 8 pm at Roulette in Brooklyn, singer-songwriter Gelsey Bell presents the premiere of her song cycle Scaling at this year's Vital Vox Festival, a two-day series dedicated to expectation-defying vocalists as composer-performers. In an attempt to defy our own expectations for our interview, Bell and...

"[Music is] one of those beautiful forms of human expression that actually brings people together. I think if we all adopt music as our religion, we'll be in a really great place." --Maya Beiser

It is no secret that the new music community has found a vital home in New York City in recent years. The creative minds behind what is known as "contemporary classical music" are innumerable, and gaining prespective can be an overwhelming task for audiences.

Beginning on October 14, however,...

It is no secret that the new music community has found a vital home in New York City in recent years. The creative minds behind what is known as "contemporary classical music" are innumerable, and gaining prespective can be an overwhelming task for audiences.

It is no secret that the new music community has found a vital home in New York City in recent years. The creative minds behind what is known as "contemporary classical music" are innumerable, and gaining prespective can be an overwhelming task for audiences.

Beginning on October 14, however,...

It is no secret that the new music community has found a vital home in New York City in recent years. The creative minds behind what is known as "contemporary classical music" are innumerable, and gaining perspective can be an overwhelming task for audiences.

Chamber music ensembles tend to form because of a palpable chemistry felt between the individual players. But yMusic isn't quite like many of its contemporaries. The New York-based sextet -- clarinetist Hideaki Aomori , trumpeter/French horn player CJ Camerieri, cellist Clarice Jensen, violinist/guitarist Rob Moose, violist Nadia Sirota, and flutist...

On September 13, the composer/singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane unleashes what is typically considered one of the trickiest of musical creatures -- the sophomore album. Conventional thought might dictate that an artist has two options: one, continue with the proven dynamic of the first album, but with added compositional devices or embellishments...

The Autumn influx of new albums is nearly upon us, and I'm not quite ready. I'm still thinking about two on-the-margin releases from the previous 12 months that made me listen differently while revealing something significant about how the artists approach sound. In late 2010 and early 2011 respectively, the...

On July 31, the Chautauqua Theater Company (CTC) closed out its 2011 New Play Workshop Festival with a first-ever marathon day of all three featured plays -- Michael Mitnick's Elijah, Michael Golamco's Build, and Molly Smith Metzler's Carve.

I would not normally recommend seeing three plays in the span...

It was eleven short months ago that Sufjan Stevens effectively returned to songwriting. A five-year hiatus had separated the venerated indie singer-songwriter/composer from what many considered to be his last "proper" studio album, but in late August of 2010 he released the All Delighted People EP, an album-length appetizer to...

Perhaps the initial appeal of the documentary film Make, for some, comes from the promise of a soundtrack that in part features music by Sufjan Stevens (his 2010 album The Age of Adz cites one of the film's featured artists, Royal Robertson, as inspiration). Perhaps it stems from the curiosity...

Labeling ambient music as "cinematic" is like saying a poem is "descriptive" -- those facile observations may very well be true, but they hardly begin to explain why the music moves us, or why the words resonate. The truth is that words don't have to be descriptive to be effective,...