More than ever we need heroes. Alice Hertz-Sommer is one of mine. Alice practiced the piano several hours each day usually from memory and with total absorption—Chopin waltzes, Schubert impromptus, Bach inventions, Beethoven sonatas and she played chamber music with

It is estimated that 30-35 million young people play the piano in China. The sudden prominence of outstanding Chinese pianists today including Yuja Wang, Li Yundi, Chen Jie and Lang Lang, and other Chinese instrumentalists, can be attributed to Zhou

Kurt Masur had a comparatively simple philosophy on music and musical performances. “Conductors,” he once wrote, “should only conduct those pieces where they feel they have something special to say; then people will accept it.” Although Masur has not shied

Can you name an instrument used for an orchestral solo that used to be so common that nearly everyone owned one but now are quite rare? One piece of popular light music calls for an instrument that was in every

Once I entered an elevator with my red cello case. I swung it up so it stood upright. Although I tried not to make eye contact someone was still prompted to ask questions.

The remarkable Orquesta de Instrumentos Reciclados de Cateura [Recycled Orchestra of Cateura] is a project from a village next to the Cateura landfill outside the city of Asunción, Paraguay, and is the subject of a new documentary entitled Landfillharmonic.

David Ilana and I were invited to the Silk Road Piano Festival in Xian in 2014. Xian is famous for its thousands of terracotta soldiers buried in 210–209 BCE by a paranoid emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who wanted to make

Schoolteachers mold each new generation—what a responsibility. But when it comes to how we value educators who tops the list—the math or science teacher, the reading instructor or the basketball coach? In my book, music teachers are the heroes.