August 20, 2024In 1931, Duke Ellington (1899–1974) told a reporter: “I’m going to compose a musical evolution of the Negro race.” In…
August 19, 2024In 2017, Joe Alessi, Principal Trombonist of the New York Philharmonic, visited the jazz club Birdland with friends. On the…
August 19, 2024Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) is perhaps best known as one half of the songwriting duo (with Oscar Hammerstein II) that created…
August 19, 2024By the time writer Charles Burney wrote this posthumous description of George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) in 1785, Handel was long…
August 19, 2024Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) is closely associated with the genre of concerto, and for good reason. The Baroque musician…
August 19, 2024The works of American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939) are always infused with a modern flair, but that does…
August 19, 2024Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) was one of the most naturally gifted orchestrators and storytellers of all time. Among his…
August 19, 2024When asked what she might be if not a musician, Hilary Tann (1947–2023) answered: “a geologist.” Tann’s great appreciation of…
August 19, 2024Ukrainian composer Levko Kolodub (1930–2019) told stories through his music from his first symphonic poem, The Stonemasons, completed in the…
August 19, 2024Sometimes the story of a composition’s creation rivals the tale it tells. Carl Nielsen (1865–1931), the most influential Danish composer…
