When Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn put on Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream to entertain their family, the two of them played all the characters! Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer […]
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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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By the time he was a teenager, Felix Mendelssohn was already an excellent pianist and composer. And Mendelssohn was very talented in other areas. In addition to German (his native […]
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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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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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Probably no playwright has had more music based on his work than William Shakespeare. Felix Mendelssohn, Henry Purcell, Hector Berlioz, Giuseppe Verdi are just a few of the composers who’ve […]
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Benjamin Britten composed his Simple Symphony when he was twenty, but he based it on music that he’d written much earlier — some of it when he was only 10! […]
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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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The word fanfare comes from a French word that means to blow trumpets. Fanfares have been used for centuries to announce someone or something important. Presidential inaugurations, movies, the Olympics […]
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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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