LOS ANGELES — Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs are pristine and painful, witty and wicked, forbidding and seductive. The mild-mannered Bryce Dessner is not the first composer I would have ...

Robert Mapplethorpe’s most provocative photographs can still provoke. In “Triptych (Eyes of One on Another),” a new work inspired by the controversial photographer, composer Bryce Dessner ...

The conversation has changed, but many of the questions Robert Mapplethorpe's work provoked still resonate today: issues of consent, sexuality, liberation, and control.

The concert version will premiere with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall, accompanied by 100 Mapplethorpe images. A larger-scale theatrical staging will travel to ...

If Mapplethorpe’s photographs are descendants of Italian Mannerism and Renaissance art, Dessner hears the a cappella singing of Roomful of Teeth on a continuum with the madrigal tradition.