Long before the recent cultural revolution that wants us to slow down the pace of our lives known as the Slow Movement, we had the slow movement in music. Composers have always known that to balance their music, there needed

Does your music collection have a cross-section of classical and electronic music? If not, it should. Because classical and electronic music share many sonic similarities. The number of contemporary pop, rock, electronic, and alternate music groups and composers who have

Alfred Brendel is one of the reasons why I play the piano. My mother was a great fan of Brendel, and my love of Schubert’s piano music, especially the Impromptus and Moments Musicaux, is the direct result of my mother

French composer Erik Satie was a curious, eccentric man. He had a penchant for grey corduroy suits (he had seven identical ones) and umbrellas, and apparently only ate white food. His response to a critic who said his music lacked

Playing a musical instrument is an amazing endeavor. It’s thrilling when a performance is everything we want it to be and the audience erupts in applause. If we’ve conveyed the beauty, meaning, and emotion of the music, and not the

As far as living legends of music go, for me, Steve Reich is pretty up there. A pioneer of minimalism, this New Yorker’s hypnotically enthralling music has been captivating people since his early days in the 1960s, and he shows

Do you ever think you might be practicing in your sleep? Yesterday I went to practice Debussy‘s prelude La cathédrale engloutie, which I’m preparing for a performance later in the year. The second section, when the waves start to roll

Before you run screaming into the night, stop. New classical music has changed, it’s now listenable, and not just squawky. Cynics will be in a rage if I tell them that old classical music is just a bunch of stuff