“As in her frequently programmed work, “Stabat Mater,”something about her harmonies captures both profound grief and the beauty to be found in grief’s shadows.”
“Try these Romantic works on for size and see if you, too, aren’t surging with potent ideas, dominating your rivals, and generally inseminating the world with your presence.”
“When I spoke to Paola Prestini over Zoom, we immediately started talking about her dream to make an opera out of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, a novel about two women whose lives are forged in response to each other. Prestini’s music is just as defined by her collaborations.”
“We are regularly bombarded with information about Schumann’s syphilis, Mozart’s interest in rimming, and Tchaikovsky’s unfortunate love for his nephew. But what about the kinky exploits of women composers in history? In the name of gender equality in music, I have ranked the sex lives of 30 women composers in totally objective order of worst to best.”
”In Italy, people often tease me for my dumb, American optimism. Hope is naïve, or even worse, a willful state of ignorance: It looks at patterns that haven’t changed for centuries, and then ignores them to feel better in the moment. Hope seems even dumber on the island of Sicily, which has been dominated and exploited by various powers for ten thousand years, from Ancient Greeks to Islamic emirs to Spanish kings to gangs of roving bandits to the Mafia, and where a sense of fatalism is culturally ingrained. The Sicilian proverb “a bon’è ca si mori” consoles that “at least one day you’ll die.”
”In a 1994 interview with Italy’s history channel RAI Storia, Goliarda Sapienza, proclaims her dislike of one-night-stands. Men have so many insecurities the first time you sleep with them, she says. Then she remembers an exception. Glee spreads across her face. She hesitates. The interviewers, Anna Amendola and Virginia Onorato, zoom in. It is clear no one knows what will come next. ‘Oh well, I can say his name,’ Sapienza says. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.’”
“If friendship is a means of knowing yourself, it involves faith in precisely what cannot be known: an instinctive belief that the other is the complement to your own unconscious, going beyond concrete facts or commonalities. The feeling of something deep within you being enacted, spoken, painted, played before your eyes in another person.”
“For New York Jews, lining up for a heaping pile of hot meat on sandwich bread is a familiar ritual, and I would say that spleen is merely an extreme-sports version of pastrami.”
“Cold Cuts and Conceptions” | Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books 2020)
“Few daughters know exactly how many abortions their mothers have had. Few daughters even know their mothers have had an abortion. When my friend Ella found out at sixteen about her mother’s she was so shocked she didn’t speak to her for a week—and her mother had only had one.
‘You’re the sole survivor!’ my mom said jokingly after she told me she had had five. “It’s because I’m hyper-fertile,” she added. “You might be, too. When I was getting my fifth, the doctor said he was really impressed by how fertile I am.”
“Kandinsky y Schoenberg / Schoenberg y Kandinsky” | Revista Nexos Translated into Spanish by Nicolás Medina Mora
“In Chinese, the characters to describe the kind of intense intellectual bond that transcends words like “friendship” or “romance” mean: “know yourself.” The term is pronounced zhiji in Mandarin, but even across other dialects and pronunciations the written characters remain the same. In other words, the baseline idea that to know yourself depends on recognizing your image reflected in another, or that friendship is a communion with one’s deepest intuitions, stays constant on paper. It only changes shape in execution.”
“For Adrienne” | The Massachusetts Review
“If you know a piece really well, you can start thinking about something else for long stretches of time and then suddenly realize you are still playing, with no idea what part you’ve reached in the music.
It’s hard to tell if you’re truer in your inattention, or if your carelessness hurts you in the end. You weren’t paying attention so you’ll never know.”
