Miles Hoffman
Host, WriterMiles Hoffman is the founder and violist of the American Chamber Players, with whom he regularly tours the United States, and the Virginia I. Norman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Chamber Music at the Schwob School of Music, in Columbus, Georgia. He has appeared as viola soloist with orchestras across the country, and his solo performances on YouTube have received well over 700,000 views.
His radio modules, A Minute with Miles, are a national production of South Carolina Public Radio, and since 2002 he has served as classical music commentator for NPR’s flagship news program, Morning Edition, a program with a national audience of some 14 million people. His musical commentary, “Coming to Terms,” was a weekly favorite throughout the United States from 1989 to 2002 on NPR’s Performance Today, and his first book, The NPR Classical Music Companion: An Essential Guide for Enlightened Listening, first published in 1997, is now in its tenth printing from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Miles has written articles for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Wilson Quarterly, and he recently published a new book, Inside the World of Classical Music: 205 Illuminating Mini-Essays, which is a collection of his A Minute with Miles pieces. A distinguished teacher and clinician, and former dean of the Petrie School of Music at Converse College, Mr. Hoffman has presented countless master classes, workshops, children’s programs, and other educational programs at schools, colleges, and conservatories around the country, and he has been a featured lecturer and keynote speaker for orchestras, chamber music series, festivals, and various professional organizations and conferences. He is a graduate of Yale University and the Juilliard School, and in 2003 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Centenary College of Louisiana in recognition of his achievements as a performer and educator.
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If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus, or the play it was based on, you may have gotten the impression that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was some sort of giggling idiot who just happened to be really good at writing music. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. -
Louis Spohr isn’t one of those composers who fell into complete obscurity. But for better or for worse the majority of his works remain unknown to modern audiences.
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If you’d like a remarkable example of the genius of Leonard Bernstein, I recommend that you listen – or listen again – to the song “Cool,” from West Side Story.
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Every musician will tell you that there are some musicians who just seem to have better ears than others do.
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One of the reasons Mozart’s operas seem so profound to us is because they’re so true to life, and perhaps especially true to life’s complexities and contradictions.
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The tools and techniques of conducting have changed a great deal over the centuries.
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One of the common dangers of studying composers’ lives is finding out that some of the people whose music we love and admire turn out to have been very unadmirable human beings.
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Should we really care about the personal lives of the composers we admire?
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Ears can be trained. Which is why every music school in the world offers ear-training courses. I suppose it should go without saying, but for musicians the ability to recognize fine distinctions among sounds is crucial.
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Bach and Mozart died over two hundred years ago – – Is there anybody alive today whose music will be played two hundred years from now? It’s a tricky question.
