Mystery Revealed: Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat
Tell me if this has ever happened to you: you’re out and about when you hear a brief passage of gorgeous classical music, which never gets identified,…
The Music of Chaos & Creation: Jean-Féry Rebel’s “Elements”
The Ancient Greeks held three notions about the nature of the universe that held sway for centuries over Western scientific and religious thought. The first was that…
Reclaiming a Classic: Beethoven, the Conservative
Few composers command an image as striking as Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) does in the contemporary imagination. Generations of lovers of classical music grew up thinking of…
J.S Bach and the Musical Mind
“To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervor, to give wings of eternity to that which is…
The Seasons in Music
Music and nature have formed a close symbiosis from the beginning. Music is itself rooted in the facts of nature, in mathematical ratios and acoustical overtones. And…
Swans, Art and Pain
The closing scene of the ballet, Swan Lake, carries a real-life poignancy that can be hard to capture in 19th-century story ballets. In the ghostly light of…
On the Purity of Music
Music is often claimed to be—and valued as—a “pure” art, one detached from the referents to the external world that we find in painting or literature. Music…
Immortal Beloved: Musical Love Letters From the Great Composers
Love has inspired countless composers, some of whom have written pieces dedicated to, or directly inspired by, their own beloveds. Here are ten of the best musical…
The Prog Rock Collector
Given that progressive rock tends to be literary and intelligent, it should not be shocking that there are also many great books coming out about the genre…
Beethoven’s Fourth: The Underrated Symphony
In the canon of Ludwig van Beethoven’s works, the Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Opus 60, stands as a singularly neglected and underrated masterpiece. Many would…
Cinematic Bliss: The Korngold Violin Concerto
I was driving when I heard Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto the first time. It was a library CD I’d just borrowed, back in the days when…
The Musical Universe and Mozart’s “Magic Flute”
Feelings are ‘vectors’; for they feel what is there and transform it into a here. — Alfred North Whitehead Let me begin by saying to our alumni: Welcome home!…
Beyond Modern Theatrics: Restoring the Dignity of Painting and Music
The seventeenth century French querelle des anciens et des modernes suggests that the dawn of the modern world is marked by the rise of a new theatre. …
César Franck’s Soaring Symphony in D Minor
Many of us have been in a church or concert hall where an organ is being played, all those chords and majestic sonorities cleverly manipulated to create…
How to Appreciate Twentieth-Century Music
Twentieth-century classical music is intimidating for many people. I believe this is mainly due to what has been written about it rather than to the music itself…