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On This Day
17 September: Isang Yun’s Symphony V Was Premiered
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.
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Fixing the Trumpet
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
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On This Day
16 September: Joseph Haydn’s Le Pescatrici Was Premiered
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
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Augusta Holmès’ Symphonic Poems
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
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Lampooning Richard Wagner
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
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On This Day
15 September: Bruno Walter Was Born
Bruno Walter [Schelsinger], born on 15 September 1876 in Berlin, is celebrated as an outstanding conductor in an era of great conducting. He worked closely with Gustav Mahler and held major positions in Europe and the United States. His work
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Claude-Emma Debussy: The Story of Debussy’s Doomed Daughter
Arguably, the person who composer Claude Debussy loved most in the world was his daughter, Claude-Emma. Father and daughter were extremely close and extremely like each other. Claude was inspired by fatherhood to write several of his most famous works,
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Violence Against Men
The Age of the Castrato
Fairy tales normally start with “Once upon a Time,” and generally end with “and they lived happily ever after.” But some of the supposed musical fairy tales I’ve been reading about are not nice stories at all. I am talking
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