Search results for

There’s an old joke about the husband who’s been out late drinking, and when his wife asks him where he’s been, he latches onto a word he saw on the cover…

Robert Schumann called taking the titles of musical compositions too literally “clumsy.” Schumann’s friend Franz Liszt, on the other hand, coined the term…

The timpani, also called kettledrums, have been regular members of the orchestra since about 1700. Their history can be traced back to ancient times in…

Every composer since Beethoven has composed in the shadow of Beethoven. And no one ever felt Beethoven’s enormous and enduring presence more keenly than…

Today is the birthday of the composer Alexander Borodin. Borodin was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1833, and he became famous as one of the group of…

To make an arrangement of a musical composition is to rewrite the composition for a new set of musical forces—to rewrite a wind quintet for string quartet, for example, or to transform a string quartet into a piano trio.

Under the heading “Real Musical Understanding,” here’s something that Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote in 1910:“…Some teachers lay a great deal of stress upon…

The body length of a full-size violin is about 14 inches, give or take a very small fraction. This is a standard length, and an optimum length, arrived at…

One of the things I’ve learned as a string teacher is that good habits can often replace a student’s bad habits quickly, because the good habits make…

Did I ever tell you that I once won ten dollars from Leonard Bernstein? When I was a student at Juilliard I learned the Viola Concerto by William Walton,…