Blogs

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30 Best Classical Music Movies As Rated by Rotten Tomatoes
Looking for a movie about classical music to watch? You’re in luck! Today we’ve not only assembled a list of thirty movies about classical music, but we’ve also checked in with movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes to see which
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The Perils of Playing and Instrument Drops- it’s a Thing
As if we musicians don’t have more than our share of challenges to contend with, we heard the recent story of the energetic and exultant conductor who kicked a soloist’s violin right out of his hands. The Czech violinist, classical,
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Violence Against Men
The Age of the Castrato III
Current research has suggested that the castrati “were considered to be a gender of their own, partly because they were not classified as male or female in society. They drifted, so to speak, in a gender limbo, often carrying a
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Free Polyphony in a Modern Style: Martinů’s Madrigals
Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959), the younger compatriot of Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), was much more widely traveled than Janáček, largely due to the wars of the 20th century. Martinů, living in Paris in 1940, emigrated temporarily to Portugal and then
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Thomas Britton: Charcoal and Handel
You’ve probably never heard of the charcoal merchant Thomas Britton (1644-1714). He came from a small village in Northamptonshire and moved to London to become a highly successful merchant. In his spare time, he started to take singing lessons and
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Violence Against Men
The Age of the Castrato II
Castration for musical reasons was never really officially legal. In fact, it was banned under Canon Law and punishable with excommunication. The music historian Charles Burney traveled through Italy in search of places where the operation was carried out. He
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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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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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