A Minute with Miles

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 “loud wood.”

Maurice Ravel was certainly a composer who pushed boundaries, including the technical boundaries that musicians faced when performing his music.

The composer Ernest Bloch was born in Switzerland, and after spending time in America, he was thinking of returning to Europe. But a visit in 1922 to the Library of Congress, in Washington DC, convinced Bloch to stay in this country, and to take American citizenship.

Imagine, for a moment, Mozart walking down Broadway, in New York City. It’s not so easy. But Lorenzo da Ponte, who wrote the librettos for Mozart’s operas Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and Così fan tutte, died a New Yorker.

Prokofiev visited America a number of times, and his concerts here were extremely successful. His opera The Love for Three Oranges was premiered in Chicago, and he met his first wife, the soprano Lina Llubera, in New York City.

As a young man, Ernest Chausson studied law, and was admitted to the bar. But music was his great love, and instead of practicing law he enrolled at the Paris Conservatory.

For composers, mistaken concepts of progress can be downright dangerous.

In the field of music, Progress has at times been a misleading concept.

It was in the 1830's and 40's that a German flutist and flute maker named Theobald Boehm revolutionized flute playing.

The flute is one of mankind’s oldest instruments, and in one form or another it’s been known to virtually every culture around the world.