Jennifer Gersten, a doctoral student in violin performance at Stony Brook University, is an editor at Guernica and the winner of the 2018 Rubin Prize for Music Criticism. Follow @jenwgersten Let the ...

But, counterintuitive though it might seem, I don’t think sound is always a helpful way to understand genre. I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, ...

Few art forms on earth are more indebted to class privilege than Western classical music. For most of its history, it has relied on monarchs, aristocrats, and wealthy patrons even to exist. We have ...