Blogs

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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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What Does Your Favorite Beethoven Symphony Say About You?
Have you ever taken a Buzzfeed personality quiz? You know the kind I’m talking about. Which trending TV character are you? What cookie do you embody? What season are you, based on your bedroom design preferences? Obviously, those personality quizzes
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Overtures for the Concert Hall
In a previous blog entitled “Beethoven (Concert) Overtures,” we examined the eleven overtures that Beethoven wrote for a variety of occasions and under different circumstances. We noted that the four overtures for various performances and versions of his opera Leonore/Fidelio
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Milestones of Piano Music
Throughout the history of music and particularly Western classical music, the piano has taken its position as the mother of all instruments. For many decades, it was common for households to have a piano in their living rooms, and many
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