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Essays, investigation and opinion on today’s cultural landscape
Phil Hebblethwaite invites you into Brahms’s German Requiem, one of the worst-named pieces of classical music in the canon. It has nothing to do with nationalism, or the church, and should have been called what Brahms later suggested: A Human Requiem. It couldn’t be more relevant in 2017
Jeffrey Boakye was going to write us a piece on why Mercury-winner J Hus ought to be the next British Poet Laureate but, halfway through, he realised that a movement, not an individual, might be deserving of the sack of sherry
In August, 95-year-old American composer George Walker had his first-ever piece performed at the Proms, as part of a concert that became the breakout story of the festival. In his own way, he’s as radical and pioneering as Nina Simone, who was famously refused entry to the same music school that Walker had already graduated from
Ahead of their performance at the British Library this week, the Radiophonic Workshop's Peter Howell reflects on four decades fathoming the complex creative relationship between the Workshop's humans and their machines
In a year when American tensions have repeatedly come to a head at the University Of Berkeley, current student Veronica Irwin argues that its her generation of supposed snowflakes who are behaving with far more maturity than their elders
Unheard for 200 years, Vivaldi became a star for the second time when an Italian group had a hit album with The Four Seasons in 1955 – the same year that rock & roll exploded. But it was a brilliant 1970 recording by Britain’s Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields that, for better or worse, made it truly omnipresent
Hey Colossus are stalwarts of the UK underground, a scene that has changed beyond recognition since they formed. Ahead of their set on our stage at Sea Change this weekend, bassist Joe Thompson looks at the rapidly changing world of DIY and asks, does the concept still exist? Photo by Julie R Kane.
The chance finding of a 1960 album on a long-gone American indie label led Phil Hebblethwaite into the enormous sound world of the supremely talented French composer Lili Boulanger, who set Psalms to music and might have written a requiem for her own death in 1918 at the tragically young age of 24
Ahead of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty's plans to do what ever they're planning to do in Liverpool later this month, Phil Harrison looks back to their infamous money burning incident and argues it has a lot to say about the times we live in now
So you think 'England Lost' featuring Skepta is an appalling single and you'd sooner push your own head into a food processor than listen to it again? Well, John Doran has got bad news for you - it doesn’t even feature in the top five worst cultural things the Rolling Stones frontman has ever done
A halo of coffee mugs? An impassable wall made from Kraftwerk box sets? The OST so frightening it can't be listened to in the dark? It can only be the return of Vinyl Staircase - John Doran's melancholy death march through this month's black wax
Perhaps no one has ever made old music sound more bracingly modern than wunderkind pianist Glenn Gould, and for his third column on a classical music record bought for a quid in a charity shop Phil Hebblethwaite finds the nutty Canadian polymath going way back in time – to some English music of the Renaissance
For his second column on a single classical record bought for a quid in a charity shop, Phil Hebblethwaite unpicks a devastating twofer – the Alban Berg Quartett playing a pair of late Schubert pieces in which this most cultish of composers dares to contemplate his sentence of death by sexually transmitted disease
Grime's enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn has been one of the oddest moments of an already strange general election campaign. But, argues Jeffrey Boakye, perhaps the two worlds of politics and the music of London's streets aren't so different after all
Sod the first few EPs, we say a band's real hidden gems are buried at the end, among the ill-advised career moves and last grasps at fading relevance. Here, tQ writers fight the corner for their favourite unloved and underrated records from the tail-end of their favourite artists' discography.
Producer, engineer and musician Grace Banks argues that recording studios are all-too-often male dominated and even hostile to women, from outright misogyny to the subtle messages in the buildings themselves. What might be done to change this?
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