Thomas May

Apart from playing trombone in the school band and the usual radio pap, I discovered music in a serious way at a relatively late age – when I was around 12. That was around the time I went crazy over an abandoned piano and thought I could learn to play all the Beethoven sonatas in a year or so “if I applied myself.” At least I didn’t lack for foolhardy ideas about how music actually works. A year or so later I began my first attempt to compose a symphony — to “prepare the way” for the opera on "King Lear" for which posterity had destined me — when I discovered with horror that my main theme in E major had been stolen by Anton Bruckner. But I’ve been trying to make up for lost time ever since, and music is a passion inseparably bound to my love of theater, fiction, poetry, film, and the other arts.

After starting my writing career as a freelancer for "The Washington Post" under Tim Page, I was lured to resettle on the West Coast when I was hired as part of the first team of music editors at Amazon.com. Nowadays I’m a full-time freelance writer focusing on music. My interests are voracious, from early music to Nico Muhly, and I have a serious passion for exploring how contemporary composers are transforming the legacy of “classical music” (imploring indulgence for the quotation marks: it’s just that I’ve found they’re the most efficient way to deal with that burden of a misnomer).

These days I write for the online newspaper crosscut.com, Listen magazine, and Gramophone; I also regularly contribute to the program books of some of the leading institutions in the music world. Since 2009 I’ve served as the English writer and program editor for the Lucerne Festival; I also translate German for the Lucerne Festival and other institutions.

Please visit my blog at www.memeteria.com or follow me on Twitter @memeteria.