On Recent Comments About Opera

By Daniel Asia Over the last few weeks, there has been a simmering ruckus about opera and ballet, the state of affairs with the Washington National Opera, and some musings on contemporary operas. Timothée Chalamet put opera and ballet down. He said he wouldn’t want to work in ballet or opera, because these fields are …

Read more

If Not Now, When?

A Review of The Armed Jew by Adam Fuller Professor Adam Fuller’s book, The Armed Jew couldn’t be timelier. As Hamas seeks to find accommodation with Israel through Trump’s peace plan, it is a reminder of their butchery of October 7th, 2023, with the massacre of over 1000, many of them young people, and most …

Read more

Deep Listening: Exploring Music with Daniel Asia

This interview originally appears on American Sephardi. Please visit their website here. The American Sephardi Federation’s Sephardi Ideas Monthly (SIM) by Dr. Aryeh Tepper is a continuing series of essays and interviews from the rich, multi-dimensional world of Sephardi thought and culture that is delivered to your inbox every month. Daniel Asia is an award-winning …

Read more

A Review of Wynton Marsalis’s Moving to Higher Ground

The artistic and creative personae of a performer or composer is a manifestation of his entire life experience, everything that he has listened to, and his basic constitution, and his personality. Whereas in the hard or social sciences we care little about the person who discovers a truth, because it is “out there,” with the arts, we wish to know about the painter or composer, because it comes from “inside,” it is of “them.”

Front and Center: The Place for Classical Music in the Curriculum

Music in the academy is at risk. The decline in its status, presence, and reach can be traced to the cultural shifts beginning in the 1960s. Western classical music—with its unassailable history of accomplishment and undeniable pedagogical, cultural, and spiritual significance—has fallen prey to the assault on standards and hierarchies embodied by the era’s ethos of: “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western Civ. has got to go.”