Blogs

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The Shocking Stories of Three Missing Stradivarius
Everyone knows that the most famous violins in the world were built by Antonio Stradivari. He was a violin maker from Cremona, Italy, who lived from 1644 to 1737. However, you may not know that although Stradivari’s workshop produced over
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Composer Erwin Schulhoff and How His Legacy Was Destroyed by the Nazis
Erwin Schulhoff is one of the most tragic, fascinating figures in twentieth century music. His promising career was halted by the rise of the Nazis, and he died in the Holocaust in 1942, before he could fulfill his true musical
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Let’s Not Be Brave
Margaret Brouwer’s I Cry—Summer 2020
The COVID lockdown of 2020–2022 affected composers and performers in many different ways. Some reported that, at least for the first few months, all of their activity stopped while the world reassessed itself. Many people found that their future lives
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What is a Group of Classical Musicians Called?
A group of classical musicians performing together is called an ensemble. Some ensembles consist entirely of instrumentalists, while others consist of singers. Of course, there are also ensembles where instrumentalists and singers perform together. A variety of ensembles appear in
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Samuil Feinberg the Composer
“Any work of art leaves us an impression of uniqueness and rarity”
For a number of commentators, the pianist Samuil Feinberg (1890-1962) was considered a bridge, the most important link, “between the two distinct factions of the celebrated Russian school of pianism, which pitted Scriabin’s mystical, sexual, opiate music against Prokofiev’s dynamism
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The Widows of Bach, Mozart, and Mendelssohn: What Happened to Them?
Music lovers have always been fascinated by a good composer’s death story. Beethoven supposedly raised his arm in defiance of a thunderstorm while on his deathbed. An entire mythology arose surrounding Mozart’s final illness (“was he poisoned?”). Bach’s Art of
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New Music for the 20th Century
John Cage was given a book of the I Ching (Book of Changes), a classic Chinese text that uses a hexagram symbol, to create order out of seemingly random occurrences. One of the first works that he used the I
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From Dawn to Dusk in a Child’s Life in Music and Pictures
Life for Tchaikovsky in the late 1870s was fraught: his short-lived marriage was disintegrating, his suicide attempt was unsuccessful, and his doctor looked at his nearly mad patient and ordered him off to the countryside for a complete rest. Financial
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