The Music Hall founded by Andrew Carnegie in New York City opened on May 5, 1891 with a concert conducted by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It quickly became known simply as […]
Famous soloists such as Isaac Stern and Artur Rubenstein have played there and as
If you love reading about composers, compositions, and music traditions, you’ve likely enjoyed something written by a music scholar. These folks go by many names and use many tools to study all these things. Not all musicological topics are historical, and not all music scholars are musicologists. So today, I want to break down for you the three major disciplines of academic music study people pursue when they want to write about music history and culture: musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory.
Together, music theorists, ethnomusicologists, and musicologists have given us books
Growing up in Chicago, Margaret Bonds was surrounded by music. Her mother, Estella Bonds, was an organist and fixture of the South Side’s classical music scene. Her composition teachers included […]
Margaret may have written her cantata for Christmas, but she and Langston were thinking
A. Kori Hill Some folks joke that Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) wrote the same concerto 200 times. He didn’t; he wrote at least 300, some think as many as 500, though […]
didn’t; he wrote at least 300, some think as many as 500, though not all of them have
A. Kori Hill If you study classical music, you’ve probably been told to take the edge out of your sound and make it pretty. There is so much classical music […]
Each musician has at least four other things they have to play.
A. Kori Hill Repetition is a funny thing–it can be boring or exciting. It can make you feel like you’re going nowhere or rediscovering something familiar. You can feel all […]
It may be a while before you notice that more instruments have come into the texture
Even if you don’t know it, you’ve probably heard it. I’m talking about “Hallelujah” from George Frideric Handel’s oratorio, Messiah. Celebrating the triumph of the Christian savior, Jesus Christ, over […]
But I’m sure you have some questions. Mainly: what even is an oratorio?
A. Kori Hill Unsuk Chin is a composer based in Berlin, Germany. She was born and grew up in Seoul, Korea, where she studied piano and initially wanted to be […]
But her family didn’t have enough money to get her piano, let alone keep paying for
An educational outreach program of 90.9 WGUC
Kori Hill Have you ever been excluded?
A. Kori Hill Do you know about the bamboula? It’s a music-dance form whose name comes from the bamboula drum. It developed in Africa and was brought to the United […]
Would you have known Louis was using the bamboula just by listening to?
