Have you ever wondered why western music sounds the way it does?It was a question that was on my mind in my early days as a conservatory student. And I will never forget a class that took place one day, when my theory instructor sat at a piano to demonstrate how...

Is there any possible reason why an opera with this power and deeply moral message should be protested?Protests raged the other night when the opera The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams was performed at the Metropolitan Opera.  It is good to protest operas that...

Carl Nielsen I always feel a little suspicious when the works of a particular composer need “promotion,” don’t you? The first such composer who comes to mind is Paul Hindemith. Back in the 1940s, my parents attended some meetings of a Hindemith Society in New...

Dolora Zajic – Are you going to tell me that anybody sang this aria better than this in years gone by?In case you missed it, the title of today’s post is a joke. But it is a joke with a point, because just when you think you have heard the dumbest thing ever said...

I recently wrote an article “Twelve Musical Works that Every Student Should Know,” for the Classical Archives Newsletter. In the weeks since then, I’ve been thinking about cultural literacy, which can be roughly defined as a person’s knowledge about the most important...

I grew up listening to recordings of Toscanini performances on LP. Mostly, I played a boxed set of Wagner orchestral excerpts so often that the LPs were practically playing both sides at once. I also spent a lot of time listening to the 1947 Toscanini recording of...