among them a historian who had won a MacArthur prize. We’d all been to an art opening, and, over dinner, a painter among us was holding forth on the work we’d seen. “As you know,” he said, bringing in ...

The composer Gabriel Prokofiev (grandson of Sergei Prokofiev) discusses how composers such as Schoenberg killed off 20th-century classical music for all but a small elite audience. Until the early ...