Some of the most beautiful music in the world is an image, not a sound. And in these works of musical art, there is often another message to be read. In 1477, the Chansonnier Cordiforme (the heart-shaped songbook) was a

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 17, K. 453, “Allegretto” The Mozart household in Vienna was frequently described as a place of controlled chaos. Joachim Daniel Preiser, an actor from the Royal Theater of Copenhagen, described an afternoon with Mozart

The young Sergei Prokofiev made his mark on the piano world with a brilliant showcase piece, written when he was 23. The Toccata, Op.11, was cleverly designed to display the composer’s brilliance not only as a composer but also as

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Morning Song on the Day of Creation, Wq. 239 In the spring of 1768, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and his family relocated to the city of Hamburg. C.P.E. had been appointed Kantor at the Johanneum and

The fact that the names of the pitches of the scales are both consonants and vowels opens up a great deal of possibility in terms of hiding words in music. The alphabet that can be hidden is larger than you

Eklipse, a German-based string quartet, is turning the traditional look of the string quartet upside down. No more conservative clothes and demure attitude, this group takes the string quartet into the realm of heavy metal styling: eye patches and leather

Philadelphia OrchestraEugene OrmandyArthur Rubinstein The Polish-Russian War of 1830/31 was essentially an armed rebellion of a politically partitioned Poland against the Russian Empire. Although the Polish resistance was able to achieve some minor victories, the Imperial Russian Army quickly crushed

We were talking about tempo and how composers sought to transfer the sound in their ear to their performers’ brain. Starting in the Baroque, Italian words such as Allegro and Andante were used to show relative speed. But composers wanted