John Philip Sousa, the so-called “March King” was a phenomenon of the entertainment world. Around the turn of the 20th century, he was quite possibly the best-known name in music. Audiences on both sides of the Atlantic were dancing his

We’ll explore more of the brass by looking at the trombone. The name is a combination of two ideas: tromba from the Italian for trumpet and -one, which is the Italian suffix for something large, so a trombone is a

Antonio Vivaldi was born in 1678 in Venice. Over the course of his career, he became one of the most popular and influential composers of the Baroque era. Here are a few background facts to get you started: He began

For making noise long distances, there’s nothing like the trumpet. According to the Bible, after marching around the city of Jericho for 6 days, the walls came down on the seventh day, succumbing to trumpet-blowing and shouting. Research has shown,

Added to our list of ancient instruments, starting with percussion and the harp, we have to add the flute. Starting from blowing on a hollow reed and then hollowed-out bones, the flute became an extension of the voice. The flute,

Global classical music audiences love music from Russia. It’s bold, it’s imaginative, it’s romantic. Consequently, composers like Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich, and others are beloved fixtures on concert programs, generations after their deaths. But those household names haven’t been the

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on 7 May 1840 in Votkinsk, a town almost eight hundred miles east of Moscow. Nowadays he is remembered as music’s quintessential Russian Romantic, and a forebear to giants like Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich. Today

Once you get beyond banging two rocks together (percussion), one of the oldest instruments next invented was the harp. It’s a very simple concept of a frame with differing lengths of strings stretched across to create the pitches. This may