‘We’re going to have a tonal centre and tap our feet, and that’s the way it is.’ Steve Reich is in full flow, talking to me from his home in New York. ‘The big break, the knife down the line, was betw

Picture the scene: you’re about to get up on stage to give a presentation or performance. Something feels off – you look down, and realise your shirt is missing; in fact, you have no clothes on at all

When I recently showed a cassette tape to my 11-year-old daughter, she looked genuinely baffled. ‘What is it?’ she asked. My first thought was that I’d failed as a parent, but then I realised there’s

On entering a room containing a piano, what pianist doesn’t turn white at the command, ‘You can play – let’s hear you!’ You thought you were visiting friends, not giving a performance, so of course yo

There has been a tectonic fragility to the early weeks of 2026, the uneasy sense of an old world shifting. New horror in Syria, Venezuela, Greenland, Iran; ongoing terror in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan. In t

The thumping that had been going on overhead all morning suddenly stopped. Clara paused, red pen hovering over one of her pupil’s dogeared exercise books. A strand of brown hair fell across her sea-gr