Hannah A. Barnes

Thoughts on Criticism

On June 29th, 2026, writer Alex Ross made his last published contribution to The New Yorker as its principal music critic. Ross made it clear in a post on his website that he will continue at the magazine as a staff writer, contributing periodic essays on music and other subjects. Still, his departure from the post feels like a significant loss at a time when intelligent, public-facing arts writing—the kind that refuses to shy away from what many call "difficult"—is already nearly impossible to find.

Inspired by Ross’s contributions to The New Yorker, his excellent books The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century and Wagnerism, and my own conviction that we desperately need robust conversations about aesthetics, I am taking it upon myself to contribute to filling this void. We collectively must cultivate shared experiences and vocabularies to talk about art. To that end, I recently began contributing to Tempo: A Quarterly Review of New Music (now published under Wolke Verlag), starting with a short editorial about the 2025 Darmstadt summer courses and several subsequent album reviews. I believe deeply that we need both rigorous academic journals and vibrant, public-facing scholarship which can cultivate a curious and engaged public that cares about the weird, the esoteric, and the difficult. This may be asking the impossible, but I firmly believe aspiring to cultivate critical discourse in the arts is vital.

Why do we need criticism? Music criticism has been a hazily defined and difficult discipline since its inception in the late Baroque era and throughout the aesthetic debates of Romanticism. Yet, this friction is exactly how both the music itself and the discourse around it evolve, even when the music itself resolves to stay abstract. In our present era, what little criticism actually gets published rarely rises above mere description or hollow praise, much of which most likely comes from the fandom aspects of popular music. Combine this with the shuttering or buying-up of many independent publications and laying off of professional critics at larger publishing houses, alongside long-term shifts in orchestral programming—a steep increase in film music alongside an even steeper decline in anything remotely related to the 20th-century avant-garde—and the dominant cultural landscape seems to be saying, “it’s all good, man!”

Given our current societal and political anxieties, this shift is somewhat understandable. Music has always occupied a strange place in culture, and perhaps it’s remarkable that we have collectively held on this long. When I’m feeling empathetic, I can understand why someone might hesitate to spend $100 and an entire evening to hear Bruckner or something equally unfamiliar and “inaccessible", when they could instead watch Star Wars with a live orchestra. Considering how easy it is to stay home and watch Netflix on the couch, should we just be celebrating that people are going out to listen to live music at all? Perhaps, but I don’t think that is the right path. Engaging in these active (not even necessarily "difficult") conversations is crucial if we want to move past the dominant mode of “consumption”—a horrible term so befitting of this era. “Consumption” implies passivity: sitting back, letting something happen to you, and checking it off a watchlist just to stay part of the zeitgeist until the next trend comes along. But what do these moments add up to without further engagement? Criticism—its writing, reading and discussing—helps to connect these moments, which is how we collectively cultivate an educated and curious public audience.

As a composer, my most profound experiences with art have come after being perplexed on a first listen, rolling up my sleeves, and diving in to figure out what is going on; over time, this is how I formed my own personal aesthetic philosophy. I have strong beliefs that inform my own work and how I engage with the work of others. This doesn't mean I refuse to engage with works outside my own aesthetic loyalties; rather, I believe it is vital to articulate what succeeds or fails in any given piece and how these works relate to one another. To these various ends, I intend to start a regular column here (through my newsletter and on my website) highlighting and discussing specific works, concerts, and otherwise hopefully contributing positively to the discourse at a time when we collectively need it.

Concert Review: Stéphane Lemelin Plays Late Schubert Sonatas

Sunday, 8 February 2026, 2 pm

Tanna Schulich Hall, Schulich School of Music, Montréal

Several Schulich School of Music faculty members seem to have taken it upon themselves to see who could play the most intense repertoire in one or two sittings this semester, which is a fitting way to pass the time in a cold and snowy Montréal winter. Just a few weeks ago, Prof. Violane Melançon performed the entire Bach violin Sonatas and Partitas across two concerts; I attended the first recital and regretfully missed the second (and thus the D Minor Partita — alas!) due to the cold. This dedication to presenting intense, focused repertoire by faculty is highly commendable and contributes positively to the musical environment at Schulich. There is also much to be gained as listeners and fellow musicians from these focused concerts; just as hearing Melançon play Sonatas and Partitas back to back to back (Bach to Bach to Bach…) teaches us something about what really lies at the core of this music and that wonderful resonating box of an instrument, so did Prof. Stéphane Lamelin’s performance of Schubert’s three late Sonatas (C Minor D 958, A Major D 959, and B-Flat Major D 960) did for Schubert and the piano. Those who braved the brutal Montréal February cold were well-rewarded with two intense and focused hours of Lemelin’s both technically accomplished and musically sensitive playing.

Lemelin’s playing was beautifully clear throughout all three pieces and charmingly idiosyncratic, with occasional left-foot stomps at arrival points, particularly in the third movement of the A Major sonata. I was seated in the sixth row on the left side with a clear view of his hands and their reflection in the shiny wood of the Steinway and was struck, as I always am in excellent solo piano performances, by both his fluidity and deliberateness. These Sonatas are pieces I have known well since my undergraduate days, but this recital was my first time experiencing them live. Seeing the physicality in these monumental works always adds another dimension to their expressivity, especially as the recital progressed.

Hearing these three pieces together reveals new dimensions in the music: each of the three sonatas, composed in close succession during the last few months of Schubert’s short life, is a substantial work featuring cyclic connections between movements, chromatic modulations that reach distant harmonic realms, and explosive codas. Beethoven’s influence is evident but never overpowering (part of why these pieces were misunderstood for much of the 19th century was due to the perception that they were structurally inferior to Beethoven’s, an opinion I strongly disagree with). The storminess of the first movement of the C minor sonata was well paced by Lemelin, with the hymn-like second theme in the relative major providing a beautiful contrast; the repeat of the exposition felt impactful and necessary. The highly chromatic exposition was clear in its textural shifts — I kept noticing how Schubert masterfully creates one accompaniment texture and maintains it as the melody evolves, offering a fresh perspective and animating what might otherwise seem trivial in the left hand. Lemelin’s sensitive pedalling allowed the wide registers to blend seamlessly. I especially appreciated how he concluded each movement, letting the final cadences hang in the air and resonate before lifting the pedal. Moments of fragmentation, a key aspect of the Romantic spirit, were carried out with both sensitivity and surprise; this was especially clear throughout the first movement of the B-flat Sonata as silence gradually disrupts the flow of the themes, raising more questions than answers.

Lemelin’s sensitive playing also highlighted the surprising modulations, as in the moment in the second movement of the C Minor Sonata, when everything shifts up a semitone; I knew it was coming and still felt as if the ground shifted underneath me. The submediant emphases and modulations had similar effects, and each felt surprising and dramatic without ever being contrived. Lemelin’s evidently deep understanding of this music brings out these elements, which are structurally part of the entire sonata — the Andantino second movement of the A Major, was particularly beautiful in its lamenting expression; and Lemelin carefully shaped the contrasting middle section with its sudden modulations and aggressive chromaticism. He brought out the almost operatic dialogic character of this section; the sense of drama was carefully measured. The ritardando at the end was wonderfully paced; in the moment, it felt impossible to tell just how long this movement lasted, as it seemed to stretch on forever. In the Rondo finale and elsewhere, fragmented moments hung in the air; I thought, in the moment, that they felt longer than in the recordings (by Mitsuko Uchida, Paul Lewis, and others) I know well, which worked beautifully with the hall's resonance and with seeing Lemelin’s suspended movements.

The B-flat Sonata was my personal highlight, and I’m sure the same can be said for many other listeners in the hall. Lemelin began the Molto Moderato first movement (my favourite tempo marking in any piece) after a few contemplative moments at the keyboard; as he began playing, it felt as if that lyrical theme had always been there, and he just dropped in on it. He brought out that surprising and foreboding flat-six trill, which sets the stage for all the harmonic movement in the piece, shaping it as it blends back into the interrupted texture. My favourite moment in the lengthy first movement comes just before the retransition into the recapitulation, which serves as a coda to the development. It’s cold and desolate music in D Minor, with part of the exposition’s closing theme serving as melodic material, changing registers while the accompaniment figure stays in the middle. The Romantic sense of ambiguity and expressive yearning was so wonderfully strong in this moment, all the way to the recapitulation; writing this a few days after the concert, it has stuck with me more than in any recording of this Sonata that I have heard.

The rest of the B-flat Sonata was equally well-paced and expressive, even when a chordal section in the finale had a few wrong notes. If anything, this moment of humanity in such a substantial performance only added to the Romantic character. Lemelin’s passion for this music came through to the fiery coda of the finale as he finished with a flourish and was met with thunderous applause and two curtain calls. Venturing out into the cold Montréal Sunday afternoon was much easier after being warmed by this music. It’s impossible not to feel better about the world after spending two hours with late Schubert, a piano, and a wonderful musician like Stéphane Lemelin.

Learn more about the artist at http://www.stephanelemelin.net/.

Kontakte: Again, as if for the first time in Tempo, January 2026

Excerpt:

"At Darmstadt 2025, the GBSR Duo (George Barton, percussion, and Siwan Rhys, piano) gave two outstanding performances of Stockhausen’s Kontakte, a piece that is assuredly ‘Darmstadt’ music. In a main-stage evening concert, it was met with one of the only standing ovations of the entire festival; the next day, in the more intimate 3D Audio Lab, the piece came to life once again. It felt like chamber music, improvisation, and some sort of alien dance. It was also, remarkably, played from memory. Despite being the oldest piece performed at the festival, the music felt shocking, fresh, and altogether human.

Encountering Kontakte as a composition student was what made me say, ‘I want to go to Darmstadt.’ The piece made me hear and feel the humanity and expression that are so central yet often misunderstood in post-War Modernism, opening a whole new world of possibilities for my own experiences as a young woman in music school in Chicago in the late 2010s. It was a moment that inspired me to find my own way to create something so striking…"

“Composing Skillfully: Examining Questions of Composition Pedagogy and Curriculum in the Twenty-First Century” in Rethinking Contemporary Musicology: Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity, Skills and Deskilling, ed. Ian Pace and Peter Treagear; Routledge, forthcoming 2026

Abstract: This chapter interrogates the question ‘can composition be taught?’ and explores the issue of what an education in composition truly is. Brian Ferneyhough describes teaching composition as more of an ‘activity,’ related to Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life,’ than a didactic transference of concrete skills and methods. I will argue that a young composer’s education is divided into two parts of what must be learned, and three stages of development. Pierre Boulez describes three stages of a composer’s development with regard to individual idiom and creation of language, which serve as a model for further examination. Boulez also questions and examines the relation between creativity and craft. I will argue that these two aspects of an education in composition are complementary and form the framework for creative development. It is also necessary to examine the curricula in musical higher education, including different program structures and how this corresponds to what skills concrete compositional skills in our time of ‘deskilling,’ as first defined by Harry Braverman in 1974 to reference a lowering of skill in workers. Technology is an obvious factor in deskilling in young composers through a potential over-reliance on digital audio workstations and notation software. Composition teachers potentially play a role in minimizing this effect.

Aspects of My Compositional Practice, 2023-25

Written in partial fulfilment of the Comprehensive Examination for the Doctor of Music Degree at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University

Excerpt of the introduction:

My compositional process centres on creating and elaborating a complex musical language, meaning the engagement of multiple parameters, layered processes and structures, and constantly evolving musical materials. Time, memory and texture are the three aspects of most importance to me and underlie my thinking: time and memory encompass structure and transformational processes, and texture involves timbre and harmony. I am most interested in thorny, idiosyncratic materials and harmonies; my compositions are highly structured but seek to balance the poietic and esthesic aspects, keeping the sonic and musical goal as the highest priority. I am highly interested in complexity, polyphony, and the subsequent tension between strictly controlled austerity and unbridled chaos and expression.

I consider myself a Modernist in attitude and certain aesthetic traits and a post-serialist child of the post-War avant-garde. I agree with Julian Johnson that Modernity is a bundle of attitudes and a “self- critical reflection upon musical language” (Johnson 2015, 7) instead of strictly surface-level imitation. The complex and expressive substructures are as essential to the work as the musical skin. Additionally, I strive for a balance between the objective and explainable and the subjective and intuitive, echoing the sentiment Johnson expresses that “(f)rom its beginnings, musical modernity was thus a reflection upon the bifurcation of the modern world, between the rational objectivity of the daylight world (the appearance of things) and the ungraspable, subterranean nature of subjective interiority” (Johnson 2015, 242). My ways of thinking tends towards creating and ordering “series” of things, whether they are sounds, gestures or behaviours, and subsequently rupturing and rearranging these series. A self-awareness of materials and behaviours is crucial to this manner of working.

Since beginning my doctoral studies at McGill, I have continued to develop my compositional language and approaches; each piece I have composed directly confronts and expands upon ideas and interests I first discovered and defined during my undergraduate and Master’s studies, as well as the two years before starting my doctorate in which I taught and freelance composed. The works I will focus on are A very short space of time through very short times of space (which will subsequently be abbreviated as AVSS), composed for the Chicago-based piano-percussion duo, Flannau Duo, and La Ligne de la rupture (hereafter referred to as La Ligne), composed for McGill’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, both composed in 2024.