Although Jean-Philippe Rameau had established a solid reputation as a teacher, organist and theorists, his musical fortune rested squarely on the shoulders of Alexandre-Jean-Joseph Le Riche de la Pouplinière. A leading patron of music in France, La Pouplinière was fabulously

Jean-Philippe Rameau: Dardanus “Overture” Jean-Philippe Rameau was deeply in love with Marie-Louise Mangot. She must have been a remarkably charming, and extremely pretty 19-year old maiden. After all, a 42-year old bachelor does not give up his solitude all that

In the Flemish 16th century, a new style of painting became popular: Vanity Paintings. Unlike today’s ‘vanity publishing,’ where you pay to have your immortal work put into print, Vanitas Paintings were about a deadly sin.

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