Search results for

When I was a little boy just starting violin lessons, my teacher’s instructions were that I should practice a half hour every day. For a six-year-old this…

The year 2018 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein’s life was, more dramatically and certainly more publicly than…

Why should somebody else—anybody else, whether it’s a program annotator or a radio announcer—tell me that a piece of music is “sad,” or happy, or light,…

Every musician will tell you that there are some musicians who just seem to have better ears than others do. We’re really talking about the brain, rather…

The most common tempo markings in music are words like allegro, adagio, and andante. But often composers indicate expression along with tempo, and this is…

Outdoor concerts can be delightful, especially when the music and the natural surroundings make a perfect mix. Then again, when you’re playing outdoors,…

When musicians and music scholars prepare performances of works by dead composers, they often get stuck in arguments over determining what the composers’…

Claude Debussy was a great composer, but like many other famous composers, he was also a wonderful writer. He wrote countless articles of music criticism,…

Why should somebody else—anybody else, whether it’s a program annotator or a radio announcer—tell me that a piece of music is “sad,” or happy, or light,…

Percussion players can vary the sounds of their instruments by using different kinds of drumsticks, or drumsticks with different kinds of heads. Timpani…