Mozart’s Divertimento K522 (also nicknamed ‘A Musical Joke’) is said to be inspired from his pet bird, a starling. The awkwardness of the piece is said to mimic the way starlings whistle off-key. Likewise, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony incorporates the song

A recent concert by the distinguished Emerson String Quartet (Eugene Drucker, violin; Philip Setzer, violin; Lawrence Dutton, viola; Paul Watkins, cello) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. paired Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 15 in E-flat minor, Op. 144

Mitrofan Petrovich Belaieff (1839-1904) was a music publisher in Imperial Russia but made his money in the wood industry. Despite inheriting his father’s business and being successful in it for some 30 years, his heart was really with music. He

50 days after the Resurrection of Christ, the Holy Ghost descended upon the Apostles. The biblical narrative states, “And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they

Following my introduction to music therapy, I wanted a bit more detail, about what goes on in a typical session. I also wanted to figure out how people found their way to a music therapist – not literally, of course,

Notre-Dame de Paris is the most famous Gothic Cathedral of the Middle Ages. Construction began in 1163 and had to overcome a number of architectural concerns. The popular Gothic building style called for higher and thinner walls. As the walls

The scholarly paper “Player preferences among new and old violins,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January 2012, shook the foundations of one of the longest held beliefs in Classical music. In this study, judges

The topic of music therapy is, to put it gently, mind boggling. When I began to undertake a couple of articles on music therapy, I thought… I didn’t know what to think, actually. Music therapy was always one of those