From the archive
28 July 2025
What happened when the satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer, who died on Saturday at ninety-seven, came to puritanical Adelaide in 1960?
Books & arts
24 July 2025
This year’s BBC Proms celebrate composer, conductor and audience favourite Pierre Boulez
Books & arts
3 July 2025
Is the act of composition itself a performance?
Books & arts
13 June 2025
What “Scarborough Fair” tells us about popular music-making
Books & arts
16 May 2025
What is Spotify doing to music?
Books & arts
4 April 2025
Thirty-six year after its premiere, there is finally a recording of Michael Tippett’s problematic last opera
Other Voices
21 March 2025
Why breakthroughs emerge from fooling around
Books & arts
13 March 2025
For writer Charles King, Handel’s Messiah offers “the staggering possibility that the world might turn out all right”
Books & arts
1 February 2025
Looking for the music in James Mangold’s biopic
Books & arts
14 December 2024
Joni Mitchell’s latest biographer creates a new geography of her work and influence
Books & arts
9 December 2024
Musicologist Lawrence Kramer wants his readers to think differently about the sound of music and the music of sound
Essays & reportage
6 November 2024
Targeted by hackers and sued by publishers, the Internet Archive continues to push boundaries
Books & arts
4 November 2024
A poem, a painting, a chance remark — almost anything can ignite the composer’s imagination
Books & arts
8 October 2024
Authenticity isn’t quite the right word for what Neal Peres Da Costa is aiming to achieve
Books & arts
10 September 2024
Composer Alexander Goehr swam against the postwar tide
Books & arts
13 August 2024
How do you pack the history of music into less than fifty thousand words?
Books & arts
8 July 2024
Despite her clean-living reputation, the great American singer was a risk taker
Books & arts
12 June 2024
The drive for musical authenticity needn’t always reach back
Books & arts
2 April 2024
In the wake of a war and the Holocaust, how should music commemorate?
Books & arts
9 February 2024
Packed with back story, a generation of TV themes showed producers to be taking music more seriously
Books & arts
15 December 2023
It’s not just slimmer royalty payments for his compositions that make our music writer look back wistfully
Books & arts
6 November 2023
The new Rolling Stones album circles back to the band’s earliest days
Essays & reportage
4 October 2023
With a new album just released and seventy years of playing under his belt, jazz pianist Mike Nock continues to perform, compose and mentor
Books & arts
27 September 2023
How pianist Paul Grabowsky benefited from the generosity of the Wilfred brothers and other Indigenous musicians
Books & arts
11 September 2023
Joni Mitchell’s Blue suffuses Amy Key’s memoir of single life
Books & arts
4 September 2023
The many lives of Noël Coward, playwright, composer, director, actor and singer
Books & arts
29 August 2023
Politics wasn’t far away when Blood, Sweat & Tears brought the house down in Romania
Books & arts
9 August 2023
The Hungarian composer György Ligeti remained endlessly inquisitive
Books & arts
10 July 2023
Singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams’s memoir is an instant classic
National affairs
5 April 2023
A capacity to enable fruitful cross-cultural interaction was among the strengths of Yolngu leader Yunupingu, who died last weekend