Castration for musical reasons was never really officially legal. In fact, it was banned under Canon Law and punishable with excommunication. The music historian Charles Burney traveled through Italy in search of places where the operation was carried out. He

2024 marks the 150th anniversary of Gustav Holst, born in Cheltenham on 21 September 1874. He devoted his life to teaching and composition, crafting nearly 300 works in a variety of genres including orchestral music, chamber music, brass and military

American pianist, writer, and teacher Jonathan Biss experienced an extreme panic attack in the middle of playing a recital. He had wrestled with anxiety around performing music for many years, and he felt ashamed of it. As he explained in

Isang Yun’s Symphony V premiered on the composer’s 70th birthday, on 17 September 1987, with Hans Zender conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the soloist. Using poems by Nelly Sachs, Yun makes an unambiguous statement of his intentions.

The natural trumpet, i.e., one that’s just a length of tubing, get its pitches from the overtone series. However, this is a limited range of pitches and to get ones that are in a particular key requires that the trumpet

Joseph Haydn’s first full-length opera Le Pescatrici (The Fisherwomen) to a libretto of Carlo Goldoni premiered at Eszterháza on 16 September 1770 on the occasion of an elaborate marriage celebration in honour of Countess Lamberg, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy’s niece, and

The Anglo-Irish-French composer Augusta Holmès (1847–1903) was born in Paris, daughter of a wealthy Irish officer and an English mother. Although her parents would have preferred her to have an interest in the plastic arts of drawing and painting, it

In the aftermath of a performance of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1861, everybody tried to figure out what the so-called “Music of the Future” was all about. Many critics mock Wagner for trying to depict absurd narrative details and even