American pianist, writer, and teacher Jonathan Biss experienced an extreme panic attack in the middle of playing a recital. He had wrestled with anxiety around performing music for many years, and he felt ashamed of it. As he explained in

Isang Yun’s Symphony V premiered on the composer’s 70th birthday, on 17 September 1987, with Hans Zender conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the soloist. Using poems by Nelly Sachs, Yun makes an unambiguous statement of his intentions.

The natural trumpet, i.e., one that’s just a length of tubing, get its pitches from the overtone series. However, this is a limited range of pitches and to get ones that are in a particular key requires that the trumpet

Joseph Haydn’s first full-length opera Le Pescatrici (The Fisherwomen) to a libretto of Carlo Goldoni premiered at Eszterháza on 16 September 1770 on the occasion of an elaborate marriage celebration in honour of Countess Lamberg, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s niece, and

At one point, Mexico was known as New Spain. In fact, it was a colony of the Kingdom of Spain for over 300 years, and the colonial masters rather brutally ruled their subjects. In the end, a Catholic priest in

The Anglo-Irish-French composer Augusta Holmès (1847–1903) was born in Paris, daughter of a wealthy Irish officer and an English mother. Although her parents would have preferred her to have an interest in the plastic arts of drawing and painting, it

In the aftermath of a performance of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1861, everybody tried to figure out what the so-called “Music of the Future” was all about. Many critics mock Wagner for trying to depict absurd narrative details and even

Bruno Walter [Schelsinger], born on 15 September 1876 in Berlin, is celebrated as an outstanding conductor in an era of great conducting. He worked closely with Gustav Mahler and held major positions in Europe and the United States. His work