Some of Anton Bruckner’s students decided to play a trick on him. While he was out to  lunch, they played music on the piano for Bruckner’s dog. As one of them played a motive from Richard Wagner’s music, the others chased the dog around the room and slapped him. But when they played from Bruckner’s […]

Phrases have their own topography—they move forward with the line but also remain wedded to the ground with each change of harmony, and this is where the battle lies, why each piece of music grapples with its own destructive potential, why beauty is never what it appears to be. — Simon Tedeschi S. Tedeschi, Fugitive, […]

Title: Meditation I Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score SAMPLE:

Benjamin Appl on working with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: When people ask me about what I learned from Fischer-Dieskau, that’s what I always come back to: of course I could say a hundred things about technique and his reputation, but what I found most inspiring was how he created everything afresh. Whenever he was teaching he’d prepare […]

“Every great work of art has two faces: one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.” — Daniel Barenboim. Cited in: Barenboim, Daniel & Said, Edward (2002) Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. New York: Pantheon Books.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel—or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel—is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. A person who had never known another human […]

Boulez declares: “Any composer of our time who has not felt the necessity of the serial method is worthless.”  Omit the word “not,” and I agree. Ned Rorem (2000) Lies: A Diary 1986-1999.  Cambridge: MA: Da Capo Press, p.69.

“There was a time, not so long ago, that Klaus Heymann was accused of trying to destroy the classical music industry. That was around the same time that the world realized that Naxos, Heymann’s budget-record label, was not just another series of CDs in the bargain bin. At first, nobody really knew what to make […]

The future direction of music demands that musicians today lose themselves in technology and learn from their mistakes. In the past, musicians tended to view technology as a nuisance—something someone else did so they could be left alone to create. But technology and music are merging rapidly—forcing musicians to view software as part of their […]

“The future of classical music lies with the younger generation, which must be weaned away from the cacophony of rock and the neon glitter of “American Idol”-type TV shows. Instead of dragging children to concerts, where they squirm with boredom, rent some old movies featuring soundtracks of classical music. Even toddlers can be exposed to […]