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A song cycle is a set of songs whose texts—often by a single poet—are linked by a common subject, mood, or story. Though the songs of the cycle are all…

It’s hard to write a good piece of music, a piece whose elements fit together in ways that make sense, a piece that has a beginning, a middle, and an end…

The French playwright Molière once said, “Anyone can be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.” Well, no one would dispute that there are many…

I was looking at a list, the other day, of composers who were born on today’s date, April 11, or who died on April 11. One birthday name I recognized…

In 1950 a musicologist named Wolfgang Schmieder published an enormous catalogue of J.S. Bach’s works, but Schmieder organized it by category, that is, by…

For at least six hundred years, composers have been borrowing the melodies of folk songs and incorporating them into their compositions. And there’s a…

Mozart, they say, could compose music while he was playing billiards. Rossini wrote that he had once composed an overture while standing in the water…

A colleague and I were listening to a Bach violin concerto on the radio some years back. After a while my colleague said, “You know, there are a thousand…

In 1928, the centenary of Franz Schubert’s birth, H. L. Mencken began a celebratory essay with these words, “Franz Schubert… has evaded the indignity of…

I know I don’t have to tell you how wonderful Mozart’s music is to listen to… but if you’re not a musician yourself you may find it interesting to know…