Sufjan Stevens’s symphony for New York
November 3rd, 2009
The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is a miserable stretch of road. The BQE, as New Yorkers call it, has narrow lanes, no hard shoulder, countless potholes, and is usually one long traffic jam. As sources of artistic inspiration go, it’s an unlikely one; but when eccentric singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to write a symphony about the city he calls home, he immediately turned to this crumbling concrete flyover.
“It inspires loathing, resentment, anger,” says Stevens of the BQE. He calls the work “a wilful romance …
