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I’m always fascinated by the stories of musicians who were famous and terribly important in their own time but whose reputations at some point dip or dim…

Have you ever seen a lefty violinist? I’ve heard of a few, but in my whole life I’ve only met one string player who holds the bow in the left hand and the…

In May of 1761, Benjamin Franklin was in Cambridge, England, and he heard a man play a performance on musical glasses. They were crystal wine glasses…

Today is the birthday of the composer Gustav Holst, born in Gloucestershire, England on September 21, 1874.Holst was remarkably prolific: he wrote eight…

We tend to be reluctant these days to say that one piece of music is better than another or that one composer is better than another. Often this…

If you’re a flutist, you almost certainly know the name “Philippe Gaubert.” But if you’re not a flutist, you probably don’t. And yet Philippe Gaubert was…

Sic transit gloria mundi – Thus passes worldly glory. Louis Spohr was born in Germany in 1784, and during his lifetime he was one of the most famous…

In 1838, ten years after the death of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann traveled to Vienna, and while he was there he paid a visit to the graves of Schubert…

Composers often call for repeats, in their music, for whole sections of their pieces to be played twice. And the question is: what’s the point? One answer…

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in classical music, the final movements of instrumental pieces—the finales—were almost always in fast…