When renowned composer John Williams first watched a rough cut of Schindler’s List at director Steven Spielberg’s home in Los Angeles, he got so choked up he couldn’t speak. “I had to walk around the room for four or five minutes to catch my breath,” Williams recalls. “I said to Steven, ‘I really think you […]

Ask him to write a song, though, and he’ll likely turn you down on the basis that he has a problem with “any form of authority, and the authority that is put upon you of writing a song”. “Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight…” he says. “It’s always the same bloody structure. I end up […]

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See also Sacred Music

“It’s like, why move to Florida if you don’t like the sun?” says Menken when I visit his home in North Salem, an hour out of New York. “Music is a viscerally powerful medium, both on a bodily level and on an emotional level. There are intellectual components about it, but its basic strength comes […]

Numbering of psalms. Different translations of the psalms have been used. For consistency, the psalms are labelled by the Hebrew numbering first, followed by the Greek number in parenthesis.

Abraham Chasin performed the premier of his Second Piano Concerto with the Philharmonic Orchestra in March 1933.  It was conducted by Leopold Stokowski: At the first one [rehearsal], as I walked to the piano I was surprised to see Stokowski’s assistant, Artur Rodzinski, on the podium; Stokowski was sitting in solitary elegance in one of […]

Franz Liszt owned Beethoven’s Broadwood piano.

Xaver Schydner von Wartensee, in the early days of meeting Beethoven, was curious about a tale he had heard about Beethoven and a spider. Before Schnyder had become acquainted with the immortal Master, he had read the well-known anecdote according to which, when Beethoven was practising the violin in his garret, a spider lowered itself […]

Beethoven was premiering his piano duet, March (op. 45) with duet partner Ferdinand Ries.  When a young count spoke loudly to a lady friend in the room next door, Beethoven jumped up and shouted “I will not play for such swine.” Source: Arganbright, Nancy (2007) “The Piano Duet: A medium for Today”, The American Music […]