Essays, reviews, and
insights about music by Matthew Friedman
The Avant-Groove: When Avant-Garde Music “Made the Scene”
Morton Subotnick arrived in New York in the fall of 1966 already a giant in the burgeoning avant-garde music scene. Together with composer Ramon Sender, a tape recorder, scattered equipment borrowed from a local high school or through a fortuitous connection with the…
Reviews
Johann Sebastian Bach, the Goldberg Variations (Deutsche Grammophon 4864556, 2023); Víkingur Ólafsson
I grew up with Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations. My father had his 1956 debut recording on Columbia Masterworks (ML 5060) that established the then-24-year-old pianist as a…
Johann Sebastian Bach, The Well Tempered Clavier Book I (Columbia Masterworks D3L 333, 1965) and The Well Tempered Clavier Book 2 (Columbia Masterworks D3M 31525, 1972); Glenn Gould
I’m Canadian, and of a certain vintage, so Glenn Gould is kind of synonymous with Johann Sebastian Bach in my mind. This is what I grew up with, and it is how I expect Bach to…
Tomaso Albinoni, Six Concertos Pour Hautbois (Erato, EFM 18024, 1975) – Pierre Pierlot, Oboe, I Solisti Veneti conducted by Claudio Scimone
This was one of my father’s favourite records. It has been in the family since the 70s – I am pretty sure that my father bought it at Sam the Record Man as soon as it came out in…
Listening to Music
“Music is inscribed between noise and silence, in the space of the social codification it reveals,” Jacques Attali noted in Noise: A Political Economy of Music. “Every code of music is rooted in the ideologies and technologies of its age, and at the same time produces them.” It is the aural space where we create and where we interrogate out times. For Attali, that meant probing the limits of political economy, but it is more than that: It is where we sing out stories and harmonize our collective lives. That is why we must listen, and this website is about my adventures in listening to music…
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