Selling music in the Renaissance wasn’t that different from selling music today. Published music needed a way to differentiate itself from other, similar pieces of music. The title pages tended to look alike: Name, composers’ name (maybe), patron, voice part,

Desert Island? No problem. I’d take the five Beethoven Cello Sonatas hands down. Spanning all three periods of Beethoven’s life they essentially depict his whole life story — from the lyrical Sonata in F major Op. 5 Nr. 1 to

When Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was born on 8 March 1714 in the city of Weimar, his father was employed as court organist at the ducal court. By then, Johann Sebastian had already acquired a fierce reputation as an organ

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Trio Sonata in A minor, Wq. 148, H. 572 I have always wondered what it must have been like to grow up as the son of Johann Sebastian Bach. The old man was known around town

Teaching must be one of the most hazardous professions worldwide. And I am not necessarily talking about public schools in Angola, Los Angeles or the Bronx. Nor am I talking about bulletproof glass, metal detectors or semi-automatic weapons. There are

When we think of folk music, we often think of music that is far removed from what we do in daily life. So how do you modernize something that is considered to exist almost out of time – we rarely

In 1853, with a stack of original compositions in his backpack, Johannes Brahms (1833-1896) finally found enough courage to visit his musical hero Robert Schumann. Their brief encounter prompted Schumann to pen his famous article “Neue Bahnen” (New Paths) —

Time marches on and in music, you have to keep track of it. Before we get to time signatures, we have to talk about notation of pitch duration, i.e., how long is a note? In yet another example of a