A Man with a Passion: the 6 degrees of William Cobbett
Walter Willson Cobbett may not have composed symphonies or even picked up an instrument as a child, but his influence in the world of chamber music is so far-reaching that […]
2017 Amateur Chamber Music Workshop Photos
Photos from the Amateur Chamber Music Showcase (3.26.17) Chet Swartz – violin, Doris Swartz – piano Beethoven Serenade for Flute, Violin and Viola: Debbie Stephenson – flute, Karan Wright – […]
On musical memories and Faure’s Piano Quartet no.2 op.45
The hardest thing to put into words is the feelings you’ve forgotten about that only surface when listening to music. Clouded with the dust of the everyday mechanics, your brain […]
On Steven Stucky’s Piano Quartet
by Jeannette Fang It was on Valentine’s Day of last year that Steven Stucky passed away. Brain cancer, they reported. “Steven Stucky, Composer Who Won a Pulitzer, Dies at 66” […]
On “Cruel ragtime” and Chopin nocturnes
Sometimes musical kinship between two vastly different composers isn’t readily apparent until you start practicing for a concert that you’ve programmed them on. One wouldn’t naturally find similarities between the […]
On Dohnanyi’s Piano Quintet no.2 in E-flat
In our first rehearsal yesterday of Dohnanyi’s op.26 Piano Quintet, Juliette, who was unfamiliar with the work, remarked on how nostalgic it seemed. “Was it a late composition?” Meh, more […]
On Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on Music
Richmond homeboy Edgar Allan Poe will get the spotlight this coming Sunday with a couple of very cool works that you may not know about. More than a few composers […]
On the Artwork that inspired Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (part 2)
Okay, so the thing I find super cool about the pictures that inspired Mussorgsky’s composition is that they were mostly related to other works of art. Viktor Hartmann was an […]
On Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition
Pictures at an Exhibition is probably Mussorgsky’s most popular work, though he never had the satisfaction of knowing that. Plagued by severe depression, the composer basically drank himself to an early […]
On Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-flat, D929
Before I start waxing poetic on Schubert’s great E-flat piano trio, I wanted to give you a quote from Stanley Kubrick, who had used this piece in scenes of Barry […]