Joseph Haydn has entered music history as a jovial, grandfatherly figure with a reputation for a quick wit. Generations later, we still chuckle at the stories behind the Surprise Symphony or the Farewell Symphony. His famous good humor is all

By 1918, the century-old Franco-Belgian traditions of violin and organ studies, developed at the Paris Conservatoire, had undergone modifications that helped consolidate their tenets, empower their disciples, and spread their influence worldwide, to this day.

We saw a wonderful cartoon the other day and realized that we’d been in those practice rooms and we had heard music by those composers. You can hear some of this kind of playing by the fabled Portsmouth Sinfonia. This

The 1960s saw the continuing evolution of the musical. More and more it took looks at contemporary society, either in the wild world of Wall Street, as in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, or at today’s youth,

Franz Joseph Haydn is recognized today as the central figure in the creation and establishment of the Viennese Classical Style. Famous around the mid-1760s, by the 1780s he had become the most celebrated composer of his time. And from the

It’s a testimony to the public knowledge of classical music when we look at a couple of Bugs Bunny classics as part of the Merrie Melodies series. One of the first cartoons where Bugs takes on the classics is Long-Haired

On reading concert reviews What do you do when you read a concert review that you disagree with? Do you bristle with ripe indignation because the reviewer did not concur with your view of the concert and then fire off

The story of Christmas has had a powerful hold on the imagination of writers around the world for centuries. Literary greats ranging from Charles Dickens to Kurt Vonnegut have referenced a variety of Christmas rituals, but the central drama of