This episode of my favorite canons starts with an accidental discovery. In 1975, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France acquired the first edition of the Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It turned out that this particular printed score had originally belonged to Bach

The medieval music theorist Guido d’Arezzo (ca. 991–992—after 1033) was a Benedictine monk who made a critical development in the history of music. His music treatise, Micrologus, was one of the most widely available medieval treatises on music. Guido first

No celebration is fulfilled without the presence of music. On October 1st, 2024, the People’s Republic of China, which was founded on this date in 1949, commemorated its 75th anniversary. On September 29th, just two days before the National Day,

Modern music. Can we ever get used to it? Oftentimes, we think of modern music as being for the elites; over-intellectual, and ultimately, unlistenable. It is very rich though, and many schools came out of the modern movement. From the

Have you ever taken a Buzzfeed personality quiz? You know the kind I’m talking about. Which trending TV character are you? What cookie do you embody? What season are you, based on your bedroom design preferences? Obviously, those personality quizzes

Throughout the history of music and particularly Western classical music, the piano has taken its position as the mother of all instruments. For many decades, it was common for households to have a piano in their living rooms, and many

For American composer George Antheil, the mechanisms of the modern age were the future of the world. He thought that ‘The environment of the machine has already become a spiritual thing…’ and wrote music that tried to capture both the

In his Goldberg Variations, Musical Offering, and the canonic variations on “Vom Himmel hoch,” Bach pursued canonic procedure to its absolute limits. The use of canon no longer merely serves to lend emphasis or cogency to the composer’s part-writing, but