After William Grant Still wrote his Afro-American Symphony, he found bits of poetry that he thought went with each movement. The poetry was written by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first […]
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Pizzicato is the Italian word for „plucked“ — it tells string players how to play their instruments at a given spot in the music. A lot of musical „traffic signals“ […]
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The music that Charles Ives wrote was greatly influenced by his father, George. From the time he was a kid, Ives heard his father experiment with sound. George Ives always […]
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Beethoven was a pianist. During his lifetime, the piano changed quite a bit, and those changes were reflected in the music Beethoven composed for the instrument. William Black, who was […]
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Tritsch-Tratsch — the title of a polka by Johann Strauss, Jr. — is Austrian slang for „chit-chat.“ A lot of composers used music to portray people making sounds: talking, laughing, […]
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Copland’s first cowboy ballet was Billy the Kid, about the notorious outlaw who lived in the American Southwest in the late 1800's. Then, choreographer (a choreographer is a person who […]
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Zoltan Kodály developed a method for teaching music. It is still used by teachers around the world today. Jill Trinka, who teaches the Kodály Method, talks with Naomi Lewin.
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Benjamin Britten was asked to compose music for a film that explained the instruments of the orchestra to children. Britten borrowed a tune by one of his favorite composers, Henry […]
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George Gershwin was just one composer who used jazz in music that was written for the classical concert hall. So did Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, and others.
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The kind of galop that Dmitri Kabalevsky put his suite The Comedians has nothing to do with horses. In fact, it’s not even spelled the same as a horse's gallop. […]
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