Canadian pianist Ryan Wang just started the Harvard-New England Conservatory Dual-Degree program. TWoA talked to Ryan about attending Eton, the importance for every musician to experience live in many different ways, his unorthodox method for combating performance anxiety, sunsets and much more. Get ready for a smile on your face.

In twentieth-century music, not many musicians and composers were as influential and unusual as Wendy Carlos (b. 1939). The list of key players includes few women, and even fewer women who dedicated their lives to electronic music. Her status as a trans woman almost seems a mere footnote in the long list of features that make her a singular figure in music history. Read on for more.

Can you have too much Frida Kahlo? Tate Modern’s Frida: The Making of an Icon promises to reveal the woman behind the phenomenon, only to surround her with so much Frida that the artist herself begins to disappear. From one extraordinary painting to a gift shop full of familiar faces, our latest city letter considers the disappointments of Fridamania.

Emma Livry’s early death is a haunting example of life imitating art. On the surface, it perfectly corresponded to the poetic myth of the Romantic ballerina: a fragile creature beyond the reach of men, doomed to an early death. But the dancers who created this ethereal Romantic vision on stage were women of flesh and blood who had reached stardom on the stony path of a harsh reality. Read on to find out about the perils of being a Romantic ballerina.

Who sees you when you start to disappear? For women blending into the home, and the tasks that came with it, it was Childe Hassam: the American Impressionist who painted them not as they were expected to appear, whether in reality or in men’s imaginations, but as they experienced themselves. Read on to discover how Hassam made women visible by painting their invisibility.

What happens when dancing becomes a threat to the state? China’s rave scene arrived in the 1990s with smuggled CDs, ecstasy and a promise of freedom from authority, only to be driven underground almost as quickly as it appeared. Read on to discover why the problem with raves may never have been the drugs at all.

Berlin has no shortage of art, even without an Art Week. But at the Gemäldegalerie, among Cranachs and shirtless men in running gear, Alternde Meister made a case for looking at something we usually prefer not to: getting old. Read on for more.

Isamu Noguchi had plenty of ideas for New York. New York, unfortunately, didn’t always want them. At the Noguchi Museum in Queens, his unrealised playgrounds reveal an artist determined to make the city a little less serious — and a lot more playful. Read on for more.

Lisbon wasn’t quite what we expected. Its Museum of Contemporary Art was even less so. Somewhere between Bourgeois, Bacon, and a lobster telephone, my mother and I found ourselves in one of the best museums I’d visited in a long time. Read on to find out why.