Magazine

Orientalia was the title of a slender début anthology of verse, published in 1913, by Marietta Shaginyan (1888–1982), a promising Symbolist poet of Armenian descent, born and educated in Moscow. Shaginyan dedicated Orientalia to the great Moscow Neo-Romantic composer, pianist, and conductor Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943), who was then about forty, married to Natalia Satina, with two daughters.

The question “What is Jewish music?” has provoked more than a few essays, books, and late-night, booze-soaked BS sessions among Jewish (and non-Jewish) musicians, composers, and people who write about Jewish music. An inquiry that should seem to be pretty straightforward turns out to be quite elusive, begging the question, do Irish musicians have such a hard time defining Irish music? What about Greeks? Persians? Chinese?

Shocking moments in music that, like an earthquake, changed the contour of the landscape for all future musical enterprise (Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, minimalism, John Cage, French aesthetic challenging German hegemony, the infusion of jazz and Latin vernacular into the classical stage, etc.) and often scandalized the public with their emergence.

Raise your hand if you know that 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New York, as well as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Amy Beach, the first acclaimed American composer. Do I see any hands? Certainly you did not see mine. If I ever came across the name “Amy Beach,” I probably thought it was a strip of sand somewhere on the Jersey shore.