Artistic types are famous for their big personalities and the beef and rivalries that result. Over the centuries, classical composers have had more than their fair share of tiffs. Today we’re looking at the stories and personalities behind five of

One of the most influential composers in the second half of the twentieth century, John Cage (1912-1992) was a leading figure of the post-war avant-garde. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, he

Published in 1962 with the approval of Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells the story of a typical day in the life

We’re used to the two basic rhythms: duple and triple. Duple or two is because we have two feet – left-right, one-two, and off we march. Triple is for dancing, like a waltz. The fun comes when they get combined

A musician has essentially two ways to create new music; either by composing or by improvising; both of these techniques follow very different processes — creating quite different results too —, equally powerful, and defining creative areas that each musician

The prodigiously gifted Hungarian conductor Ferenc Fricsay tragically died at the age of 48. A student of Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Ernst von Dohnányi, and Leó Weiner, Fricsay was “one of the few artists in classical music that were seemingly

She was among the greatest pianists of the nineteenth century…and yet if music lovers know her name at all, it’s because she made a terrifying cameo in Berlioz’s memoirs. Today we’re looking at the life of great pianist Camille Marie

American composer John Adams (b. 1947) made his name in minimalism. He brought the contemporary into contemporary opera by using recent historical events (Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic) for his subject matter. His work in smaller