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During the time of Haydn and Mozart, the third movement of a four-movement piece such as a symphony or string quartet was invariably a stylized dance…

The little snippet of music you just heard, our “theme music,” is from the first movement, the Prelude, of the Partita Number 3 in E Major for solo violin…

Composers write pieces, and performers perform them. But for the performers, just about everything the composer writes, with the exception of the notes…

Walter Pater was an influential 19th-century English author and critic, and in 1870 he wrote a fascinating essay about the Italian Renaissance painter…

I can’t say for sure, but I would guess that most people have had what might be called recurring anxiety dreams… the kinds of dreams in which you find…

Your strange job as a performing artist—musician, actor, or dancer—is to immerse yourself completely in the work of art you’re performing—to lose…

It occurs to me, when considering the history of music, that the endlessly recurring and often bitter fights over musical styles and trends have actually…

By the late 1700's, the piano had replaced the harpsichord as the primary keyboard instrument for solo compositions, concertos, and chamber music. Lovers…

If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus, or the play it was based on, you may have gotten the impression that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was some sort of giggling…

My cousin Stephen and his wife, Kim Lee, are scientists, and they’ve developed a malaria vaccine that may one day save millions of lives. It’s taken them…