Leopold Stokowski conducted the American premier of Berg’s opera Wozzeck in 1930 (a joint effort of The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Phildelphia Grand Opera, and Curtis Institute).  Abram Chasins recalls a rehearsal: I attended his second rehearsal with the orchestra in the pit and singers on the stage.  After some twenty minutes of singing and acting, […]

With shifts in the commercial music industry away from smooth jazz, musicians are finding new niches for smooth jazz such as cruises. Twenty years ago, of course, smooth jazz wasn’t a code to be cracked so much as a wave to be caught. Like most species of pop, it felt ubiquitous and maybe a little […]

An account by R. L. Stevens (1775): When Handel was blind, and attending a performance of the Oratorio Jephtha, Mr [William] Savage, my master, who sat next to him said, “This movement, sir, reminds of me of some of old Purcell’s music.” “G got te teffel”, said Handel, “if Purcell had lived, he would have […]

Title: Air IV Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Duet Level (Piano I): 1.2 – five finger position extended to 6/4 through to octave (left and right hands) Product medium: PDF score & MP3 accompaniment track (Audio sample of accompaniment track only)

Brahms was invited to the family of one of his students, Fräulein von Meyensbug, in Detmol : The Meysenbug ladies proved very prim and conventional. Brahms was ill at ease. He was so afraid of shocking his aristocratic hostesses that he hardly knew what to say or how to behave. Their young nephew Carl, however, […]

Alexander Gow, musician in the band Oh Mercy on spontaneity of artistic creation: [Spontaneity is] when art is expression, and that’s what I’m interested in. If, like you said, there’s a spontaneity to it and it’s an extension of a certain kind of moment or feeling, and if you’re clever enough to express that through […]

There is a story that Igor Stravinsky went to the New York jazz club Birdland one evening in 1951. Whispers went round that the great composer was in the house. When Charlie Parker came on with his quintet, he didn’t acknowledge Stravinsky in person, but seamlessly quoted The Firebird in his first number, the furiously […]

“In all types of creative work the worker and his object become one, man unites himself with the world in the process of creation.” — Erich Fromm

Greg Sanders ponders the position of classical music and describes the need for it to catch up with culture, without simply “dumbing it down”: “Of course, I think that if we really understand current culture, we’ll want to go the other way, and make classical music smarter.” Greg Sanders, Arts Journal Blog, February 2, 2009. […]

“The secret of the vital power of Tchaikovsky’s music lies in the fact that there is virtually not a single province of his music–from the gems of Russian chamber music that issued from his pen to his greatest operas or symphonic poems–in which the appeal and effect of the music was less than in any […]