For thirty years, I’ve had the high honor of serving as the music critic of The New Yorker. My archive of writing contains nearly four hundred iterations of the column known as Musical Events, as well as eighty or so longer essays about composers, performers, and attendant issues. After much deliberation, I’ve decided to vacate the aisle seat. My latest column, about the Ojai Music Festival, is my last. Although the musical scene exhilarates me more than ever — contemporary composition is eternally vital — I wouldn’t want to overstay my welcome. Also, the job requires much travel, and at this stage of life I’d prefer to stay closer to home.

I will remain a New Yorker staff writer, focusing on literature, philosophy, film, émigré stories, California stories, ancient landscapes, and new regions. I’ll still touch on music periodically, in essay form.

Let me declare my desperate gratitude to the magazine’s staff for having bettered my work at every turn — above all to David Remnick, who has given me free rein at a time when criticism is withering away, and to Daniel Zalewski, who has edited and elevated all of my print pieces since the departure, in 2003, of Charles Michener, my original minder. I cannot explain why, back in 1996, Tina Brown hired a callow youth for such an eminent position, but I did my best to justify her gamble. Lastly, I thank the passionate, argumentative, ever-thoughtful readers who have followed me on my journey from immaturity to superannuation. May the noise be with you.

Martinů, Symphonies Nos. 1-6; Jakub Hrůša conducting the Bamberg Symphony (DG)

In Darkness and Light: works of Beethoven, Iyer, Feldman; Sarah Rothenberg (DACAMERA)

Bach, Clavier-Übung III; James McVinnie (Pentatone)

Liszt, Sonata in B Minor and other works; Yulianna Avdeeva (Pentatone)

Giaches de Wert, Nono libro de madrigali; La Compagnia del Madrigale (Glossa)

Mel Bonis, Orchestral Works; Elizabeth Watts, Rumon Gamba conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Chandos)

Dvorak, Symphony No. 9, Carlos Simon, Four Black American Dances; Manfred Honeck conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony (Reference)

Jürg Frey, Clarinet Quintet; Apartment House (another timbre)

These notes appear with Bright Shiny Things’ recording of David T. Little’s What Belongs to You.

Garth Greenwell, the author of the novel on which David T. Little’s What Belongs to You is based, is an intensely musical writer, in two distinct senses. Growing up in Kentucky, Greenwell joined his high-school choir and began taking voice lessons from its director, David Brown. At Brown’s instigation, Greenwell saw his first operas: The Magic Flute and The Turn of the Screw. The latter had a particularly momentous impact on him, ushering both Henry James and Benjamin Britten into his life. Greenwell told the writer Jordan Kisner: “My entire aesthetic compass comes from that day when I was fourteen years old and saw the Kentucky Opera production of Turn of the Screw.” Greenwell went on to study voice at the Interlochen Arts Academy and at the Eastman School of Music, where one of his classmates was the tenor Karim Sulayman, for whom What Belongs to You was written. Despite his turn toward literature, Greenwell remains an exceptionally keen listener. Periodic concert and opera reviews on his Substack, To a Green Thought, are apt to make professional critics feel superfluous.

The Dream of Reason. The New Yorker, June 22, 2026.

Farewell, My Lovely. The New Yorker, June 22, 2026.

The superb British soprano, as immaculately stylish as she was subtly expressive, has died at the age of seventy-nine. She was notable for her extraordinarily precise diction, which gave the musical line a tactile, etched-in-air quality. One of the finest nights of opera I’ve heard was Der Rosenkavalier at the San Francisco Opera in 1993, with Lott as the Marschallin, Frederica von Stade as Octavian, and Charles Mackerras conducting.

Crisis Mode. The New Yorker, May 25, 2026.

“Whatever the individual or the group undertakes against the totality of which they form a part is infected by its evil — no less the one who does nothing. This is the secularization of original sin.”

— Adorno, Negative Dialektik