THOMAS LARSON

(Quillette July 9, 2025)

In 1963, eleven years after his 4’ 33”—a piece requesting a musician not play for a spell of precise time—John Cage staged a work, not of his own, but that of a past fellow traveler, called “Vexations.” The short work for piano, a kind of atonal sound-screen, was written in 1893. Its asymmetrical shape, like a craggy mountain ledge, runs out and comes back on itself and loses interest after a couple minutes. Its directionlessness seems to fulfill some yearning in its composer, as much hardship as joke: His accompanying note asks the performer(s) to play the piece 840 times in succession.

(Times of San Diego, May 26, 2025)

Earlier this month in Glasgow, Scotland, I heard the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra performing Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, whose initial falling motive in G minor, known the world over, is termed the “fate theme,” its urgency suffusing the entire work. The program writers billed the Fifth as “a pulse-pounding struggle between hope and despair.” For me, the evening was much closer to “pulse-pounding” because I had a pulse and it pounded a lot during the music and, as such, had scant recourse to hope or despair. It’s well known that adding abstract linguistic descriptions to the abstract nature of music, albeit musically meaningless, sells tickets. And yet symphonic complexity cannot ticket our subjective responses to what any particular musical pattern is “emoting”—because, as the Swedish composer Allan Pettersson notes, music has “a lot to say but it’s not about anything.”

(Times of San Diego, October 9, 2024)

When it comes to musical humor, one thing’s for sure: To be funny in sound is not like a joke in language whose weird setup (a priest, a lawyer, and a jackass walk into a bar) is upended by a punchline and a bellylaugh. Instead, amusing music follows its own rules.

It’s imitative, say, the trumpet whinnying like a horse in Leroy Andersen’s “Sleigh Ride.” It’s deliberate such as Mozart adding wrong notes to a string piece to lampoon “the work of incompetent composers.” It’s outlandish as with Haydn in Symphony 94, subtitled “Surprise,” when he follows a simple pianissimo melody with a roof-raising double forte chord, intended, legend has it, to wake up a slumbering audience.

(Times of San Diego, October 9, 2024)

After four years of waiting, the Copley Symphony Hall has been remade to enhance the San Diego Symphony sound, its musicians, and their audience response as the Jacobs Music Center. Vacated by COVID and judged acoustically repairable, the venue placed its uneven tone and barnlike feel in the hands of musically-minded engineers.

I remember many concerts at Copley: It wasn’t that bad — nothing like the unwelcome Mandeville at UCSD or the cavernous sepulture of the Civic Center where any theatrical intimacy of, say, a Broadway show, expires about row 12, the balcony patrons listening in from another county. The symphony board agreed. Copley could be overhauled — what with $125 million and computer-driven and ear-tested redesigns.

Fittingly, conductor Rafael Payare, after a donor-showcase first night, Sept. 28, chose Gustav Mahler’s colossus, the “Resurrection” Symphony, his Second, this past weekend to christen its equally colossal retrofit.

(Quillette August 15, 2024)

Though I’m a happily terrorised fan of John Krasinski’s dystopian films, A Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place, Part II (2020), a question has been stalking me since their premieres. In these first two films, giant, human-gobbling praying mantises fall to earth and begin annihilating humankind. They cannot see, so they navigate and hunt by sound, their acute hearing provoking them to attack even the faintest sound. But why are they doing this? This remains a maddening mystery. Hunger? Malice? Revenge? The racket of our outdoor concerts and football games, interstate traffic, explosive munitions in Gaza and Ukraine, the mind-frying hum of our electrical grid and data mines? The chilling horror in the first two movies unfolds without explanation.

(Another Chicago Magazine August 1, 2024)

Every once in a while, a memoir can seem like a strange beast, stepping away from the usual show-and-tell drama. Such is the case with Tomás Q. Morín’s tricky new book in which the narrator’s id claws its way through and out of the wilds of identity, the simple title notwithstanding. This skinny-spined outlier is partly about where the Hispanic author finds himself—living temporarily in an unwelcoming Northern town. But the person(s) to whom the tale mostly happens is multifocal—Morín, his son, a few bigots he encounters, or any you who carries the cross of his origin. Of those foci, the son’s presence seems the least revealed. “Jack” is an addressee, a longed-for object, a boy of many ages; he’s in the womb, a newborn, a kid, an adult who lives in Texas with “your Marxist mother” while his vexed father is alone up north, teaching composition. Morín’s four letters feel emotionally ordered; the writing is often Janus-faced, at once insistently admonishing for the son, at once cunningly creative for the reader.

(The Rumpus June 18, 2024)

Not long ago, I started ruminating about the future of memoir, a literary art that seemed to have stopped evolving, bogged down in copycat subject matter. I’m speaking of the flood of memoirs about illness by mothers and daughters (How Mom Gave Me Her Alopecia), books about identity and ethnicity (Growing Up Anxious and Andorran-American), and stories about toxic boyfriends (I’m Glad I Shot Him). I exaggerate, but you get the idea. These topics sprung from the poor-me ilk, enabled by publishers wanting more of the same, supplied by authors happy to oblige. How long would memoir be stuck in this victimhood wallow, and what would it take to bring the form back to the earlier, more surprising creative nonfiction?

Then I read Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012) by Adam Phillips and, viola, a lighted path. His therapeutic thesis is that each of us carries a story of the life we should have lived, the life we missed out on, and, according to Phillips, the life we’ve already lived, to a degree, psychically. The boxing contender who had to quit because of his wife’s illness, the songwriter who was snowed-out of her debut at the bitter end.