Dec 22, 2022

Ask a non-classical music fan to name a piece of classical music. If they don’t say Beethoven 5, or the Ode to Joy, they probably will say The Four Seasons. They might not know that it was written by Vivaldi, but the Four Seasons are a set of pieces that have made that leap into popular culture in a way that almost no...

Dec 15, 2022

You might be thinking, "Why on earth would anyone want to devote an entire podcast to etudes?"

For most instrumentalists, etudes are the bane of our existence. They are studies, meant to develop technique on an instrument. Etudes are an essential part of any instrumentalists work, but they had never been known for their...

Dec 8, 2022

In the late summer or early autumn of 1828, Schubert completed an extraordinary work, his String Quintet in C Major. 6 weeks later, he was dead. Nowadays this piece is considered to be one of the most sublime 50 minutes to an hour that exists in all of music. But when Schubert completed this quintet, he sent a letter to...

Dec 1, 2022

Film music began as a solution to a problem. Early film projectors were really loud, therefore something was needed to cover up all the noise.  In addition, silent movies apparently seemed a bit awkward without any musical accompaniment.   Enter, usually, a pianist, who would improvise musical accompaniments to the...

Nov 25, 2022

Along with Antonin Dvorak and Bedrich Smetana, Leos Janacek is known as one of the three great Czech composers. He was born in Moravia, part of the Austrian Empire at the time, and became passionately interested in studying the folk music of his Moravian culture. After World War I, when the empire collapsed and Moravia...