Chamber Music Transcriptions of Bach’s Famous Repertoire — Goldberg Variations A variation set for harpsichord that’s considered the model of a variation set? Lots of other instrumental players looked at Bach’s Goldberg Variations in envy and immediately started making arrangements

As we come into summertime, we want music that matches our positive outlook. Composers, however, may take a different look at the heat and weather conditions. They give us storms, sleepy naps in the sun, and even work to do!

When Robert Schumann premiered his secular oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri, Op. 50 (Paradise and the Peri) in December 1843 in Leipzig, the composer was instantly catapulted from provincial to international fame. In the first decade after the composition,

The first transcriptions of Chopin’s music appeared as early as the 1830s, shortly after the publication of the original compositions. In time, some 1500 composers took up the task, with some popular works transformed hundreds of times for all possible

Béla Bartók had always been interested in young girls. His first wife Márta was only sixteen when they married, and he did have an extramarital affair with the fifteen-year-old poetess Klára. Bartók also vigorously but unsuccessfully pursued the young violinist

The idea that orchestration, the technique of employing instruments to portray any musical aspect, is an integral and creative aspect of the compositional art has only gradually been accepted.

Composed to celebrate the union of the cities of Buda and Pest into the present-day Hungarian capital in 1923, the Dance Suite quickly became one of Béla Bartók’s most popular works. It did more for Bartók’s reputation, in the positive

Did you know that Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin (1889-1977), probably the most famous and most important actor in the silent film era, was a committed amateur violinist who also composed a number of his film scores? Long before Chaplin contemplated