Music & Literature, Inc., is a nonprofit organization devoted to publishing and promoting the work of underrepresented artists from around the world. Each print issue of Music & Literature assembles an international cast of writers and critics in celebration of three featured artists whose work has yet to reach its deserved audience. In addition to its flagship publication, Music & Literature offers robust coverage of the arts through its website and organizes premier live programming in cities around the globe, routinely collaborating with other cultural organizations and institutions to bring the work of its featured artists directly to audiences. The Music & Literature project is designed to meet the immediate needs of modern arts enthusiasts while enduring and becoming a permanent resource for future generations of readers, scholars, and artists.
Back Issues:
More than two years in the making, Music & Literature no. 8 showcases the work of three artists who have renewed their inherited traditions—modern literature, classical music, and jazz—and brought innovation to their disciplines. Éric Chevillard, Unsuk Chin, and Mark Turner have been expanding the possibilities of their forms for decades, and the fruits of their unwavering efforts are on full display in the most extensive M&L to date.
Beloved for his playful and sharply intelligent fiction, Éric Chevillard is a voice worthy of a global readership. His portfolio includes never-before-translated shorts, novel and journal excerpts, as well as works for children that cheekily subvert the conventions of French literature. His collaborations with visual artists, including fellow “outsider” Gaston Chaissac, receive special attention, as do his astute and often hilariously caustic reviews. Ushered into English by a host of brilliant translators, this portfolio is rounded out with exclusive interviews with Chevillard and appreciations from his peers.
Korean composer Unsuk Chin has made her home in Germany for over twenty years and gained a devoted international following for her eclectic and challenging body of work. Drawing on everything from folk music and street art to Kafka and Lewis Carroll, Unsuk Chin’s radical imagination shares a spiritual kinship with Stravinsky and Debussy, even as it claims new territories for classical music. Revolving around her own writings on her compositional process, literary inspirations, and mentor, György Ligeti, Chin’s profile also features two newly translated interviews and previously unreleased materials from the composer’s archives.
Finally, in a first for Music & Literature—one proving that the M&L aesthetic is as at home in jazz as in classical music—we are excited to offer a portfolio exploring the career of American saxophonist Mark Turner, one of the most influential musicians of his generation. Here, an extensive conversation with Ben Ratliff is complemented by a series of reflections on Turner’s life, work, and utterly unique sound by longtime collaborators, students, and friends. Transcriptions and facsimiles of his musical notebooks offer further insight into an artist of exceptional depth and creative vision.
More than 40 writers, musicians, and translators from around the world gather for Music & Literature’s celebration of Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, Swiss baroque violinist Maya Homburger and her partner, the British composer-double bassist Barry Guy, and American poet Mary Ruefle. This expansive number opens with an intimate portrait of the Brazilian legend, assembled through premiere folios of Lispector’s letters and paintings, as well as her candid final interview, while new essays by her translators and a host of international writers complete this 100-page tribute to Hurricane Clarice. Meanwhile, the musical galaxies of Maya Homburger and Barry Guy are unveiled through new twin (and entwined) interviews, a selection of Guy’s graphic scores, and a special Bach Pilgrimage Portfolio, to which the legendary conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner lends his voice. Finally, this edition concludes with the first comprehensive appreciation of Mary Ruefle’s entire career to date, with sixteen new poems and erasures by the “contemporary Dickinson” herself. Our most ambitious issue yet, Music & Literature no. 4 is a collection that, in its cumulative synergy, captures the wild intelligences of four of this century’s indispensable artists.
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 