May 25, 2026 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that caught my attention is Alex Ross’s “Crisis Mode.” It’s a review of the contemporary-music festival Witten Days for New Chamber Music that takes place each spring in Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Ross says he attended Witten primarily to hear new and recent works by Chaya Czernowin, “a composer I would follow anywhere.” I’d never heard of her. I’d never heard of Witten, either. And I’m not a fan of chamber music. But I am a fan of Ross’s writing. “Crisis Mode” contains some brilliant passages, especially the final two paragraphs in which Ross considers Czernowin’s “No! A Lament for the Innocent.” He writes,

For the most part, “No!” inhabits an abstract soundscape, though an intensely fraught one. Instruments and voices accumulate into immense, sustained, saturating dissonances, with a snare drum cutting through the tear-gas haze. Characteristically, Czernowin’s control of timbre, texture, and structure yields a kind of cataclysmic grandeur. Then, at the very end, she kicks away the frame of art and makes things blunt. Singer and her doppelgänger plead together: “Don’t take my child away / Don’t take my child / Don’t / No.” The final syllables accelerate into a blur, whereupon a ritual of wailing erupts. A composer writes to the limits of her art, and steps into the real. 

I vote that one of the best music descriptions of the year. The last line is inspired – as fine an accolade as any artist could hope to receive.