From Prodigy to Pioneer
In his remarkable memoir The World of Yesterday, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig described Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century as a place of unbounded optimism…
In his remarkable memoir The World of Yesterday, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig described Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century as a place of unbounded optimism…
Say the word “nocturne” to anyone remotely familiar with classical music and they’ll probably answer with one word: “Chopin.” This is an understandable response, given that Chopin’s…
Few contemporary composers are as well-established in the classical music repertoire as Arvo Part. Like Stravinsky, who also achieved international fame during his lifetime, Part’s music is…
Much of the classical music being composed today is characterized by what I call the Three U’s: Unintelligible, Unstructured, and Un-singable. Alternatively bland and erratic, such music…
One of the themes that quickly emerges, when examining the lives of the world’s greatest artists, is the necessity of a rigorous training period. No matter how…
Thomas J. Philbrick: The first piece of yours I came across was the second string quartet. In your comments on that quartet, you said that string quartet…
Certain composers define entire eras. Debussy and Ravel, for instance, are the very essence of French impressionist music. And no corner of the Baroque is free of…
It takes a special brand of confidence to write a western. Packed with swashbuckling films, warrior ballades, and sprawling novels—not to mention the tremendous influence of the…
A quick Google search shows that the odds of being a musical prodigy are somewhere between 1 in 100,000 and 1 in 1,000,000. In other words, low…
One wonders if Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern appreciated what they were unleashing on the world when they decided to scrap tonality and embrace the twelve-tone scale…
European composers are famous for turning folk music into concert-hall music. Dvorak, for instance, based his ninth symphony and Slavonic Dance cycle on Czech folk songs. Tchaikovsky’s…
In his memoir A Republic, If You Can Keep It, United States Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch argued that legal documents should be written so that the…