Throughout his life and career, Krzystof Penderecki (1933-2020) considered music a fundamental and essential part of the human condition. He started composing when he was six, and his whole life as an artist has been a never-ending search for self-

You’ve heard of pocketbooks, pocket watches, pocket battleships and pocket money, but what about pocket symphonies? According to Wikipedia, “a pocket symphony is a song with extended form. The term was popularized by English journalist Derek Taylor, who used it

intense, immersive, impassioned, hugely demanding and hugely enrichingJonathan Biss, pianist It’s the single most humane music imaginableIgor Levit, pianist Somewhere in the world right now, as I write, a pianist is performing or recording the Beethoven Piano Sonatas, maybe just

Celebrating her 20th season at the helm of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra this year, JoAnn Falletta is the first woman conductor to be appointed music director of a major American orchestra. At a time when women conductors had to overcome

Musical gestures in some films are all about mirroring or inferring movement. But, as we see in certain movies like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the music suggests the mental condition of the lead character, Jimmy Stewart, who suffers from vertigo. This spinning

In part I of this series, we heard several examples of how film music is designed to affect us psychologically. In this part, we look closer at why movie makers need to include music that pulls our psychological strings. In

For many pianists, our first encounter with the music of Cyril Scott is through his exotic, languorous piece Lotus Land. This was also Georgian pianist Nino Gvetadze’s first introduction to Scott’s piano music, through one of her teachers at Tbilisi

Cuban conductor, pianist, composer, and educator, Tania León, is another woman who deserves the honorific ‘Grande Dame’ for her outstanding talents and remarkable career. You may not know she became the New York Philharmonic’s new-music advisor in the 1990s. This