An Interview with Music & Literature

Michael Barron talks to Daniel Medin and Taylor Davis-Van Atta

Music & Literature, No. 4

From New Directions:

Michael Barron: What prompted the inception of Music & Literature? Could you describe the process from idea to publication?

Daniel Medin: Roberto Bolaño described his dream reader as the sort of person who engages with the complete works of an author. There’s an impulse behind this project similar to the drive to read every word by a writer like Dickinson, Kafka or—to choose a more recent example—Bolaño. Among the greatest delights of assembling each issue is the nature of the labor required: total submersion in the cosmos of a superlative artist. To my knowledge, no other journal comes close to satisfying this thirst for depth and sustained attention. In a publishing climate where commercial “viability” determines content, there’s a genuine need for such unapologetic focus. Despite its own host of challenges, being a not-for-profit assures us greater freedom of inclusion than most other editors enjoy. Quality and relevance determine the content, not word count or precedent.

Taylor Davis-Van Atta: And to plunge into the life’s work of Bolaño or Kafka—or Arvo Pärt, Max Neumann, Pina Bausch, Kaija Saariaho, Ingmar Bergman, among countless others—is a project without end. The works produced by these artists are inexhaustible, and deserve a class of accessible, smart, and enjoyable literature that meaningfully engages with them—and that provides the opportunity to discover what we haven’t encountered before. This is the base need we’re trying to address with the Music & Literature project.

In this sense, M&L began as an act of frustration, an impulse against a culture that’s too vast, diffuse, commercially-obsessed, and fleeting in its tastes to be taken seriously. In short, I wanted to publish the work that I myself wanted to read: work that spans disciplines and art forms, that pays no attention to national borders, that encourages contributions from a wide array of cultures and languages, and—above all—that aspires to the heights of the art it’s discussing.

M&L is an arts magazine, at once broadly defined and intensely focused. What has changed since its inception is our expansion into multiple venues; we now publish reviews and features online in complement to our print issues, and we’ve recently launched an ambitious events program that will take place year-round and around the world—with all of these activities concerted and aimed at serving a single mission. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• That Other Word: Episode 12
• Praise for The Cahiers Series
• László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside
• Roberto Bolaño on Literature, Kafka and the Abyss
• László Krasznahorkai: Similar Writers

The White Review Interview: Max Neumann

Joachim Sartorius talks to the artist about his work

Max Neumann at work, 2012

Joachim Sartorius (The White Review) talks to artist Max Neumann (interview translated by Andrea Scrima):

Though long celebrated across much of Europe, Neumann’s work has only in recent years penetrated the Anglophone world. The success of his most recent collaborations—with László Krasznahorkai on their chapbook Animalinside (2010), and with the US journal Music & Literature (2012)—testify to the universal appeal of Neumann’s howling, primal language.

When Max and I first met in Berlin – it must have been in the mid-1980s – we already knew each other. I had seen his exhibition at Kunstverein Bonn in 1982 and fallen madly in love with some of his paintings, while he was familiar with my translation of John Ashbery’s ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’. In the autumn of 1986 I moved to Berlin to direct the DAAD gallery’s Artists in Residence Programme, and we became friends. Two years later I initiated a show of his small works on paper, Sehr kleine Zeichnungen, at the same gallery. Max hung the show himself, and it proved a great success. I immensely enjoyed my innumerable visits to his studios, first at Hagelberger Strasse, then at Erkelenzdamm, and our talks on music and literature. I always left him in high spirits, my mind inspired, my eyes enriched by what they had seen. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside
• Gerhard Richter, Tapestries Exhibition
• David Lynch on Painting
• Rina Arya, Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World
• The Paintings of Emilio Vedova

László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside

Read an excerpt from an edition by The Cahiers Series

László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann's Animalinside

The New York Review of Books online blog has published a snippet from Animalinside, a collaboration between writer László Krasznahorkai and illustrative artist Max Neumann. Colm Tóibín describes the process: 'The writer worked first from one of Neumann’s images and then Neumann, spurred on in turn by the words, made the rest of the images to which Krasznahorkai, his mind let loose by the captured visuals, responded by writing more texts.' Animalinside is published jointly by the Center for Writers and Translators of The American University of Paris, Sylph Editions, and New Directions press, as number 14 of the Cahiers series. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Praise for The Cahiers Series
• George Craig, Writing Beckett's Letters