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When I was a little girl, I heard Gabriel Fauré’s famous Pavane in an arrangement for two pianos on a classical music compilation disc. From the very first notes, I was taken by its elegant restraint. I listened to the

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Ever since Beethoven redefined what a symphony could be, composers have been, by turn, inspired and intimidated by the genre. Today we look at the stories of how five very different composers dealt with the pressure and weight of expectation

First things first, a symphonic poem is an orchestral composition, usually in a single continuous movement. Basically, the music of a symphonic poem attempts to communicate or carry meanings, messages, or concepts that originate from outside music itself. This can

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We think of them as a summer phenomenon, a mysterious blinking in the bushes, or a trail of light seen out of the corner of your inattentive eye: fireflies! American composer Stephen Barber was in a garden in upstate New