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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Do you agree with the judgment that the two greatest composers of the late Baroque were Bach and Handel? Well, that means, unavoidably, that the rest of the late Baroque composers weren’t as good. -
He may not be well know to the general public today, but, yet Philippe Gaubert was one of the most famous and important French musicians of the first half of the twentieth century.
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I don’t suppose you have a pair of four-hundred-year-old pliers in your kitchen tool drawer, or a screwdriver made in the 1700s? No, probably not. Tools don’t tend to last that long. The tools of string players, though, are an entirely different story.
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I’ve spoken about this before, but the subject seems to come up a lot, so why not go over it again: in America, 99.9 per cent of the people who play the flute for a living call themselves flutists, not flautists. That’s not a scientific number, but I think it’s pretty accurate.
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I play concerts for a living, so you wouldn’t think I’d need reminding of the dramatic difference between listening to a recording and hearing a live performance. But it was as an audience member, recently, not as a performer, that I had my reminder – and it was a pretty spectacular one, because I was lucky enough to attend a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
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There are many great creative artists, including great composers, who have been mediocre human beings, not to mention any number who have been downright reprehensible human beings, or human beings whose private views we would find reprehensible if only we knew what they were.
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Have you ever wondered why, when we’re feeling sad, or lonely, or downright miserable, we usually prefer to listen to music that somehow reflects our mood, rather than music that might jar us out of it?
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For those of us who don’t play a brass instrument, watching brass players play always seems a bit like watching a magic show. We hear the French hornists, trumpeters, trombonists, and tuba players playing plenty of different notes, but the number of times they move their fingers—or in the case of trombonists their slides—doesn’t nearly add up to the number of notes.
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Why have Verdi's operas stood the test of time, while those of his contemporaries have not?
