Confronting Tonality

Confronting Tonality

I came to avant-garde art music fairly early (and fairly easily), through the soundtrack album for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and my friendship with Robert Kermode. Robert had similarly obscure interests, and we played a game of trying to find the most...

Avant-Garde Holiday SPECTACULAR!

After a much-longer than expected hiatus, No Sounds Are Forbidden will return on 18 December for a very special Avant-Garde Holiday Spectacular that will be, well… spectacular! With special guest Dr. Jill Rogers of University College Cork, Matthew Friedman will...

Summer Hiatus

With summer coming to an end, and the new academic term in the offing, I will be taking a short break in the last few days of Summer. No Sounds Are Forbidden will return in September with new episodes, including a look at the postwar European avant-garde’s...

I Remember: The Music of the Holocaust

At the end Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis, Kaiser Uberall accepts his fate: he will be the sacrifice which will restore the balance of life and death that his own arrogance and brutality so tragically upset. It is one of the most powerful moments in...

From the Bins: Three West Coast Composers

I had just paid for an armful of LPs at Iris Records, my local vinyl emporium in Jersey City’s Village. I was turning to leave when Steve, sitting behind the stacks of records crowding around the cash, stopped me. He pulled a record from the pile “This just came...