By: Robert Bruce On September 12, 1840, just a day before her twenty-first birthday, pianist Clara Wieck was married to her longtime beau, the thirty-year old composer, Robert Schumann. The two had met in Leipzig when Robert began studying piano with Clara’s father, Friederick Wieck, a well-known professional pianist and teacher. Over the course of…
By: Pam DeVier “I simply cannot understand how people can live without work, and how many of them do, especially the higher aristocracy… I despise them because of this.” – Dora Pejačević, from a letter to her friend, Baroness Rosa Lumbe-Mladota, written during or immediately after World War I. (Pejačević spent the war working directly on…
By: Quinn Riley Known as “The Father of American Music,” Stephen Collins Foster was born in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1826, during the celebration of America’s 50th birthday. Coincidentally, it was also the same day two of America’s Founding Fathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, passed away. Though not born into a musical family,…
By: Jomar Cruz It’s the early 2000s, and an eight-year-old boy is watching his older brother playing a role-playing videogame called Final Fantasy VII, sometimes for hours. To him, the cuboidal pixel graphics were stunning, the characters were unique, and the music was unlike anything else he had ever heard. How could a soundtrack for…
By: Chris Arroyo Born in the southwest of France to a family that wasn’t particularly musical, Gabriel Fauré never intended to become one of the pre-eminent voices of French music. He wrote very few large-scale works, among them two operas, a handful of orchestral pieces and a Requiem. However, the bulk of his oeuvre (as…
By: JJ Sechan Have you ever listened to a piece of music that struck you as so off-putting that you had to leave the room, or worse, so overstimulating that you were ready to scream? You wouldn’t be alone! As Parisian audiences flooded into the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on May 29, 1913, to hear Stravinsky’s…
By: JJ Sechan After attaining celebrity status with the premieres of The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky was once more commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev to write a ballet, this time based on existing music by baroque Italian composers. What started as an insulting chore to the composer became a career-shifting journey of…
By: Dave Carty For the past few weeks, I’ve had one of my favorite symphonies buzzing around in my head: the Symphony No. 4 in E minor by Johannes Brahms. In his day people tended to fall into one of two groups: either a claque that admired Brahms’ music as the stalwart defender of the classical…
By: Robert Bruce I love zoos. I have traveled to other cities in the United States just to visit top-rated zoos in the country. And whenever I am observing the fauna on display – be it big cats, feathered friends, African ungulates, cold-blooded reptiles, or even six-legged crawly critters – I invariably recall music describing…
By: Pam DeVier January 1776. Mozart turns 20 years old on the 27th and composes his Serenade No. 6 in D major, K. 239, better known as his Serenata notturna, a redundant title scribbled on the original manuscript in his father’s hand. While the United States was on the brink of declaring its independence, Mozart was…
