The musical genre called “Skiffle” originated in African-American culture in the early 20th century. Drawing its influences from jazz, blues, and folk, it usually featured poor musicians using homemade or improvised instruments. Washboards, jugs, cigar-box fiddles and comb-and-paper kazoos accompanied

When William Herschel (1738-1822) peered into the night sky on 13 March 1781, he noticed something rather peculiar. One of the celestial bodies he had been observing through his homemade telescope was moving oddly across the sky, and Herschel initially

Shanghai’s Municipal Orchestra, later to become the Shanghai Symphony, began subscription concerts in 1919. Under the direction of the expatriate Italian virtuoso Mario Paci, the orchestra relied exclusively on foreign players and rarely strayed beyond Shanghai’s colonial settlements. Over time,

For Richard Strauss, music was always capable of telling a good story. In his tone poems, we find a composer “capable of making poetic or narrative content and formal design coalesce with great brilliance.” Strauss’s tone poems—although he preferred to

During his early compositional career, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) exhibited a heightened sense of musical insecurity. He self-consciously responded to criticism, even when leveled by his closest personal friends, by ruthlessly destroying or severely reshaping his compositions. His Piano Quintet in

It is difficult to make a living as a composer at the best of times. But when you are trying to make your mark at the peak of music’s history as a cultural form, your chances of success diminish significantly.

Sergei Rachmaninoff and Natalya Satina knew each other since childhood. This is hardly surprising as Natalya was the child of Alexander Alexandrovich Satin and Varvara Arkadyevna Rachmaninoff. Her mother Varvara, as such, was the sister of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s father, Vasily

Just four days shy of his 70th birthday, Sergei Rachmaninoff died of melanoma on 28 March 1943 in Beverly Hills, California. He always wished to be buried at his estate in Switzerland, but the ravages of WWII only allowed for