Listen to This

When I asked what she liked about Beyoncé, she answered, with a slightly disbelieving look, “This is an album about voices, and she’s got the most amazing voice.”

He theorized love more than he experienced it. He was prone both to euphoria and to paralyzing melancholy, but he steadied himself with work. He was more a watcher of life than a participant in it: he had little time for anything unrelated to his art. There were no limits whatsoever to his musical imagination.

you decide to kill yourself by drowning, don’t do it in shallow waters.”

although he had reservations about Kid A and Amnesiac. (“Too much ostinato crescendo,” he told me.) Like most thinking people, he admires Björk, although at the gym he prefers Shakira.

“In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality.”

In other words, mechanical reproduction is not an inherently cheapening process; an outsider artist may use it to bypass cultural gatekeepers and advance radical ideas.

“It came even to pass, as the trumpeters and the singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord … The house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord.”

As in Monteverdi, the repetition in the bass mimics the obsessive, circular thinking of the unhappy lover—the painful recollection of happy moments, the sick-hearted imagining of alternate outcomes. It follows the psychological rhythm of depression: the spirit sinking step by step, straining to recover, then sinking again.

Lamento della ninfa, or Lament of the Nymph

“The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.”

OPERA