Blogs

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Should Composers Be Replaced by AI? Will They Be?
Imagine that you’re a composer. You grew up loving music. Maybe in your childhood you listened to works by giants like Mozart, and Beethoven, and Brahms. You spent decades learning an instrument. You attended elite educational institutions for many years,
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On Polymaths
Polymaths are individuals who have mastered more than one discipline. Some of the most extraordinary polymaths have excelled in a wide range of disciplines, such as science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, arts and music. Whether artistic or not, their lives have
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Goossens, Copland and the Common Man
Although his compositions are all but forgotten today, Sir Eugene Goossens (1893-1962) was considered a fresh and highly promising musical voice. At the height of his popularity as a composer in the 1920s and 30s, his music placed on par
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Five of the Most Famous Women Composers of the Classical Era
Think about Classical Era composers and you might think of men in splendid attire wearing white wigs: men like Mozart or Haydn. But you might be surprised by how many classical era composers were actually women! Most historians agree that
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My favorite Canons and Other Musical Puzzles III
This episode of my favorite canons starts with an accidental discovery. In 1975, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France acquired the first edition of the Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It turned out that this particular printed score had originally belonged to Bach
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A Hand in Music Theory
Guido d’Arezzo
The medieval music theorist Guido d’Arezzo (ca. 991–992—after 1033) was a Benedictine monk who made a critical development in the history of music. His music treatise, Micrologus, was one of the most widely available medieval treatises on music. Guido first
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Who’s Guan Xia, the Master of Music of the President of China?
No celebration is fulfilled without the presence of music. On October 1st, 2024, the People’s Republic of China, which was founded on this date in 1949, commemorated its 75th anniversary. On September 29th, just two days before the National Day,
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Can We Get Used to Modern Music?
Modern music. Can we ever get used to it? Oftentimes, we think of modern music as being for the elites; over-intellectual, and ultimately, unlistenable. It is very rich though, and many schools came out of the modern movement. From the
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