Never underestimate what a “tragic” death can do for an artist’s reputation. Who knows whether the romance of Jackson Pollock as cowboy existentialist would be intact if he had survived that car crash, entered AA, and continued to drip paintings while the art world tuned into Warhol and Koons. Or imagine a seventyfive-year-old Sylvia Plath on her third marriage, exhausted after thirty years of leading poetry workshops, reciting “Daddy” on Fresh Air. Autumn Rhythm and “Ariel” would rank as masterworks even if their creators had enjoyed a fuller measure of years. But by dying precociously, neither

As I write this, I’m humming the opening bars of Schumann’s Papillons (1829–31), one of his earliest compositions for piano, a piece I haven’t played, let alone heard, in at least six years. I can recall these notes because I remember the visceral pleasure of playing an ascending scale in octaves, the sense of expansiveness—like a butterfly’s wings unfolding—and of flight. Papillons was one of many pieces I learned as a competent (but undisciplined) amateur, yet it was one of the few I returned to again and again, even as I moved on to the Beethoven sonatas and Rachmaninoff preludes that were

(There is a tendency to represent sports, especially football, in bellicose terms. From the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, perched high upon their steeds in the iconic photograph, to the storied Steel Curtain defensive line of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, with its cold-war-ish nickname, the chatter around football revels in combat vocabulary.

In War Without Death: A Year of Extreme Competition in Pro Football’s NFC East, Mark Maske, the Washington Post football guru, continues in this vein: “Violence sells,” he writes. “Football’s natural breaks in play make it the perfect sport for TV, true,

“When I am dead let this be said of me: ‘He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.’” By capturing the anarchist spirit in this June 1870 letter, written the year before the Paris Commune, freedomloving realist painter Gustave Courbet makes an appropriate opening subject for Allan Antliff’s exploration of the relationship between European and American art and anarchist activism. Antliff considers “anarchism as a catalyst for social liberation” and points to the artist’s provocative depictions of the French

WE ARE ALL ARTISTS, SUPPOSEDLY.

But after a certain age, most of us give up the ghost on pursuits that require costly studio space, state-of-the-art equipment, or too many rewrites. To the rescue comes Christian Marclay’s Shuffle (Aperture, $30), a deck of oversize playing cards, adorned with photographs of musical symbols found in the everyday world, that serves as a kind of artistic assist, aiding anyone in becoming a composer. The idea is to arrange the cards to create a score or a musical fragment. The directions suggest using “as many or as few of the cards as you wish,” playing alone

An intertwined crash course in outsider music and cultural studies, Paul Hegarty’s dense new survey, Noise/Music: A History, traces noise music’s avant-garde and experimental roots—from Futurism, Fluxus, and musique concrète to 1970s progressive rock and punk—and examines its more recent incarnations. In his attempt to characterize “noise,” Hegarty (who, in addition to teaching philosophy and visual culture, plays in two noise outfits) admits that the concept doesn’t have a static definition; it can be designated only by context. Still, he asserts that the music “largely avoids song structure,”