What on earth is mood music? As a composer, I write music to offer or extract a certain feeling from a listener, but do I intentionally create music to suit a mood or a place? Not that I’m aware of.

This is a sharp, humorous critique of book tradition of piano instruction and the current music education system, particularly in the United States. Author, Walter Ponce, is an internationally acclaimed pianist, pedagogue, and Professor Emeritus at the State University of

During this extraordinary period of one’s musical career – at the height of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic – every teaching musician affected by lockdown has a single professional goal: instrumental lessons must be kept safe, personal and inspirational, and pupils’

John Gilhooly, Director of London’s prestigious Wigmore Hall, has announced a new series of lunchtime concerts at the Hall, starting on 1 June. This is, sadly, not a return to “normal” for classical music – far from it – but

Rhythm begins in the womb with the heartbeats of the mother and the child. The synchronisation of the heartbeats of a mother and her foetus does actually occur at times, this shows us how important that rhythm is to us

Can you imagine naming a whole class of trains after composers? That’s what British Rail did with its Class 92 electric locomotives. From Beethoven to Wagner (or, so cite British composers, from Britten to Sullivan), the names of composers from

The first image we have of Beethoven after his death is his death mask. It was common to take a death mask of famous people, either to serve as a memory or as a basis for portraits. The method was

“I always sang. Both my father (Edwin) and his sister, Muriel were gifted singers, but Edwin was streets ahead because he was also a brilliant pianist and, from my very youngest years, I had the pleasure and honour of listening