In last week’s article, ‘Music and Graphics,’ we dove into the exciting realms of possibility opened up by “graphic scores” – musical compositions that are notated in nontraditional, visually expressive ways. After a whistlestop tour through the nascence of graphic

American composer Elie Siegmeister (1909–1991) accepted an invitation to contribute to a concert series being developed for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Concerts of music by American composers were set up, and Siegmeister’s contribution was a work he’d

Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla L’Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France The Visionary Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla is not just a conductor; she is a visionary, shaping the future of classical music with each movement of her hands. At the helm of major orchestras across the

When we truly respect someone’s intellect, our first instinct is to treat them with the utmost reverence: to place them on a pedestal and see them as somehow more than human. With composers we admire, especially those well cemented in

Isolated from the surrounding carnage of WWI, Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) began to synthesise elements of German Romanticism and Eastern Exoticism through an exploration of Greek mythical subject matters and concepts from the French fin de siècle of Debussy and Ravel.

It was December 1950: composer Morton Feldman was doodling on a napkin, waiting for John Cage to finish cooking some wild rice. What Feldman had been drawing on this scrap of paper stuck with him and eventually became his landmark

Michael Tippett composed his final opera New Year in the mid-80s, during a time of social unrest in a Britain fearful of multiculturalism and increased ghettoisation of its inner cities. The opera, however, is explicitly about dreams and about the

Peace must exist in a state of calm; peace does not come to the impatient or the restless; it is achieved through serenity. Serenity, which has been defined poetically as the ability ‘to accept the things that cannot be changed’,