In the holiday season, there are distinctive holiday songs that seem to play incessantly in all the shopping malls. We hear them and they are expected to put us in a ‘holiday mood,’ but do we really listen to them?

When you think about time shifts in music, we think of Stravinsky, where in The Rite of Spring, there are sections where the time signature changes every measure. But what if there were a song, known to most people, where

Now that we’ve looked at the Classics for Christmas, let’s look at some of the new music for the holiday season. When we get to more modern music, the American songs written in the 1940s and 1950s capture our ear.

We all know the sad story of Friedrich Wieck taking Robert Schumann to court in order to prevent the “old alcoholic and womanizer” from marrying his daughter Clara. The heated court battle raged for almost a year, but once Schumann

Many famous public figures have written books. Presidents, starlets, sports stars and others who are not generally known for their literary talents have entertained us with publications detailing their personal lives. Of course, very few have actually written a single

Johann Sebastian Bach was a ferocious musical cannibal! He habitually borrowed from himself and others in order to adapt a composition to a particular performing venue or occasion. In 1729 he was appointed director of the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig.

It’s getting chillier, the morning air is brisk, there might even be snow, and with that, our thoughts turn toward the holidays. But we find that the thing that helps us with that holiday feeling is the sound of the

The art of the transcription has been with us for centuries, coming into play whenever someone tried to play a work written for one instrument on another. We were listening, the other day, to a recording of J.S. Bach transcribed