Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) was one of the last great pianist-composers in a long tradition stretching back to Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt and Brahms. He always maintained that “a composer’s music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his

They appear in the sky at the poles, flickering patterns of light that can cover the whole sky or sweep across like a curtain. The Auroras, named for the goddess of dawn, are one of the wonderful natural light displays

Collaborative Variations on Sumer is icumen in Written in the Wessex dialect of Middle English, the 13th century song Sumer is icumen in welcomes the warmest season with open arms. The cuckoo is called on to sing, the seeds are

Do you know the joke about the Hollywood screen goddess and the bad boy of music collaborating to invent a remote-controlled torpedo? Funny enough, it actually isn’t a joke but a delightful anecdote from the pages of music and science

The Italian mezzo-soprano Faustina Bordoni (1697-1781) started her career in opera in Venice in 1716. She created dozens of roles as she moved around Italy: Milan, Modena, Bologna, Naples before moving north and creating a sensation in Munich and Vienna.

From Flow My Tears to Lachrimae, or Seven Tears The composer John Dowland (1563-1626) perfected the idea of the lute song. He also thought himself as suffering from melancholy, a known illness of his time. Melancholy was one of the

The Birth of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony When he started work on his second symphony, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) started with a funerary idea. After a performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s comic opera Die drei Pintos, which Mahler had completed from

The English composer John Dowland (1563-1626) wanted to be lutenist to the English court. Unfortunately, the difficulties in England between Protestants (the court) and Catholics, made Dowland’s desire difficult to achieve, as he had converted to Catholicism while traveling in