By now, even the dimmest bulbs on the planet know that smoking is bad for your health. And we also know that exposure to passive smoking, also identified as “second-hand smoke” or “environmental tobacco smoke” causes disease, disability, and death.

With all the news these days of computer spies, we’d thought we’d look at the historical problem of musical spies. We don’t mean stealing composers’ musical ideas, but the ways in which, over the centuries, music and composers have entered

The ‘Dies Irae’ (Day of Wrath) was a poem written to be used in the Requiem Mass of the Roman Catholic Church and comes from a Latin hymn dating from the thirteenth century. As you say the Latin aloud, you

One of the most interesting songs about the United States comes in the voice of embattled immigrants, the Puerto Ricans who inhabit Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 musical West Side Story. The song ‘America,’ in the original Broadway production, contrasts an idealized

What if you had not 2 or 3 trumpets, the normal complement for an orchestra, but 12 trumpets? Well, then you’d write the Sinfonietta. The Sinfonietta, completed in 1926, was the last orchestral work by Czech composer Leoš Janáček. Now

Before Schubert and Schumann, the role of the piano in lied performances was just as a general support – the vocal line was the star and the piano the nearly invisible support. With Schubert, the ultimate lieder composer, and Schumann,

Alexander Scriabin: Mysterium Acne is an annoying and often embarrassing skin disease that frequently plunges the teenage world into turmoil. If we can trust medical advice, one should never pick, gouge, pop, scratch or squeeze the infected skin as this

One of the famous stories of demonic possession cured by music was David playing his harp to sooth King Saul (I Samuel). Although this is taken in modern times as the first instance of music therapy for the treatment of