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Ten Excerpts from Robert Schumann’s Love Letters to Clara
The love story between Robert and Clara Schumann is often regarded as one of the most romantic in classical music history. Happily for historians, many of their love letters survive. They document their inner thoughts and emotions, as well as
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Spotlight

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  • Antique Instruments in the Orchestra Antique Instruments in the Orchestra
    Can you name an instrument used for an orchestral solo that used to be so common that nearly everyone owned one but now are quite rare? One piece of popular light music calls for an instrument that was in every
  • You’re a Pro and You Still Have to Practice? You’re a Pro and You Still Have to Practice?
    Once I entered an elevator with my red cello case. I swung it up so it stood upright. Although I tried not to make eye contact someone was still prompted to ask questions.
  • The Music is the Least of It The Music is the Least of It
    The remarkable Orquesta de Instrumentos Reciclados de Cateura [Recycled Orchestra of Cateura] is a project from a village next to the Cateura landfill outside the city of Asunción, Paraguay, and is the subject of a new documentary entitled Landfillharmonic.
  • Music and Art: Pollock Music and Art: Pollock
    In this series on Music and Art, we’ve mainly been looking at representational pictures (people, trees, and landscapes). When we look at an artist from the world of abstract expressionism, all of our horizons open wide. Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was
  • Christmas Voices of the Paris Conservatoire Christmas Voices of the Paris Conservatoire
    The shameful, cowardly and revolting attacks on Paris in 2015 serve as a sad reminder that the veneer of civilization continues to be paper-thin! In a repulsive case of history repeating itself, Paris was also under attack roughly 100 years
  • The Kids of Perugia The Kids of Perugia
    David Ilana and I were invited to the Silk Road Piano Festival in Xian in 2014. Xian is famous for its thousands of terracotta soldiers buried in 210–209 BCE by a paranoid emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who wanted to make