In his 2010 novel, The Elephant Keepers’ Children, Danish author Peter Høeg uses Schubert songs to very practical end. One of the major characters in the book is a sonic engineer – she creates mechanisms that operate through speech or

Wait, what? This guy wrote film music as well as classical stuff? Pfft… Sound familiar? It’s interesting nowadays how film composers are often sneered at in relation to their more ‘serious’ counterparts. However, there was a whole generation of composers

Starting in the 16th century with small albums created by fellow classmates and continuing into the 20th century with the rise of musical groupies (actually, this started much earlier), the autograph book is an interesting view into the relationship between

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