Blogs

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Brazilian First Conductor and First Choro Composer
Chiquinha Gonzaga (1847-1935)
Francisca Edwiges Neves Gonzaga (1847-1935), known as Chiquinha Gonzaga, is considered one of the most important female figures in Brazilian music history. She was a feminist and abolitionist, and she was the first of many things: the first Choro composer,
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Costumes for Paris Opera
Jacques Drésa’s Designs
The Gallica digital library at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is one of the great research treasuries of the world. It was established in 1997 and now holds more than 10 million documents accessible online: books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, cartoons,
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Music of the Past and the Future
Dohnányi’s Sextet in C Major, Op. 37
As a solo pianist, Ernő Dohnányi (1877–1960) was usually compared to Liszt and was seen as the successor to that 19th-century virtuoso. As a composer of chamber music, however, he was usually associated with following the Brahmsian tradition. As a
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Together or Separate: Dvořák’s Three Overtures
In Nature’s Realm, Carnival and Othello
In the early 1890s, Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) stepped away from his strongly Bohemian folksong–influenced orchestral music to write three overtures that he originally intended as a unified set entitled Nature, Life and Love. In the end, however, he published the
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Five of the Best Violin Etude Books
At the risk of stating the incredibly obvious, the violin is hard to play. Some players find that, in order to master a specific skill, it’s useful to strip it from a wider musical context and focus on the specific
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Famous Quotes from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) penned a vast number of letters, starting from about the age of 14 and ranging to the last month of his life. Literally, thousands of these documents have been preserved, thanks to the foresight of his
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Five of the Best Yuja Wang Performances
Yuja Wang is indisputably one of the world’s best pianists. Her musicianship pairs an ironclad technique with a searing passion. Her fashion sense is famous, too. Nobody on the concert platform today rocks stiletto heels like Yuja Wang! We checked
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Dvořák’s American Suite
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) spent three years in America and gave us some great works written during that time that were highly influential. His use of native American and black song sources opened the eyes of many American composers to the
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