Since we recently featured the fifteen Shostakovich String Quartets and the seventeen Weinberg String Quartets, I thought it only fitting to reveal some remarkable cutting-edge tendencies in the brilliant Six String Quartets of Béla Bartók, one of the most important

The song Yankee Doodle started out as a way of making fun of one’s unsophisticated enemy. British military officers in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) had started to make fun of their colonial opponents as being ‘Yankee Doodle Dandies’, meaning

American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) was one of the most original of America’s composers. For one thing, he had a very successful day job in the insurance business, and his early work in the business led to the basics behind

Nowadays, classical music audiences are usually pretty tame. The worst that happens at an average concert is that people glare at someone else for applauding at the wrong time. It wasn’t always this way, though. Today we’re looking at seven

In automotive circles an entire sub-culture has enthusiastically emerged around modified cars. It is called car tuning and most commonly involves attempts to improve the performing and handling characteristics of the vehicle. In fact, high-end tuning companies around the world

Many classical music lovers know the story of composer Robert Schumann and his pianist wife Clara Wieck: how they fell in love as young people, how Clara’s tyrannical father discouraged the match, and how they finally got married in 1840,

“They will outlive all changes of fashion in music” The collection of six sonatas in trio sonata form for organ BWV 525-530 by Johann Sebastian Bach are generally regarded as masterpieces for the instrument. We find them in a manuscript

Tikhon Khrennikov (1913-2007) was a very powerful man indeed. During the 1930s, he was hailed as the leading Soviet composer, and by 1948, Khrennikov was nominated as General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers. That powerful state-created organization for