Learn about instruments and compositional techniques.
Audio
President's Day is observed in the United States on the third Monday of February. February 12 is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and I wonder if you knew that our sixteenth president was a great music...
Audio
Francis Poulenc didn’t have to depend on composition for his living—he was the heir to the fortune of the Rhône-Poulenc pharmaceutical company—but he nonetheless turned out an enormous body of work in...
Audio
The American composer Seymour Barab started out as a pianist and organist, but as a teenager he took up the cello, and as a cellist he became a highly successful orchestra musician, founder of...
Audio
Some great composers have been pioneers and musical radicals, and some have been fundamentally conservative. Max Bruch was a conservative to his bones, and it served him well. He established his...
Audio
Atonality and dissonance are often linked in listeners’ minds, but they’re not the same thing. Dissonance, from the Latin words for “sounding” and “apart,” is the simultaneous sounding of two or more...
Audio
Atonal music is music that isn’t written in a key, music that doesn’t follow the traditional rules of harmony. But although the term “atonal” tells us what a piece isn’t, it doesn’t tell us what it is...
Audio
Have you ever wondered how the violin came to play such an important role in the history of classical music? Well, it starts with singing. The invention of opera, in late 16th century Florence, marks...
Audio
The modern oboe most likely originated in France in the 1600's. The word oboe, which is the instrument’s name in both English and Italian, comes from the French name, hautbois, meaning “high wood,” or...
Audio
In operatic singing, there are three principal voice types for women. From high to low, they are soprano, mezzo-soprano—mezzo meaning “middle” in Italian—and contralto. The ranges of these voices...
Audio
The members of the modern violin family are the violin, viola, cello, and double bass. These instruments are descendants of various kinds of medieval fiddles—fiddle, by the way, being an older word...