Orchestral musicians like to have fun just like everyone else. We may appear dignified but fooling around is a requirement; pranks are ingenious. Sometimes the joke is on the conductor. There was once a conductor who was not, shall we

Recently, I came across a composition entitled Three Boneless Preludes for a Dog. With a name like that, it was instantly clear that it could only have come from the pen of Erik Satie. But it was still rather surprising

We went to a concert the other day of songs from WWI – popular tunes for a war that started a hundred years ago. What surprised us was how familiar some of the tunes were. Songs such as George M.

Grechaninov’s most enduring and influential musical gift to posterity is surely found in his liturgical music. Breaking entirely new ground, he returned to the old Slavonic traditional chants of the Russian Greek Orthodox Church. Folk-like harmonies and motivic counterpoint provide

Throughout his long and industrious musical career, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) never strayed far away from home. Content to live and work in his native community, and possibly remembering that he was once thrown in jail for overstaying his leave

When Gustav Mahler died in 1911, his widow Alma first sought comfort in the arms of her already-lover Walter Gropius. However, Alma still harbored resentment that Gropius had intentionally misaddressed an envelope and thus exposed their affair to Gustav. In

Alexander Grechaninov displayed prodigious musical talents at an early age. However, his father was a barely literate tradesman who expected his son to follow in his footsteps. Against the clear wishes of his father but with financial support from his

Can you imagine a musical universe without performances of the Messiah, Samson, Jephta, the Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks? These highly popular compositions might never have existed in the first place, because George Frideric Handel got into