A Minute with Miles

Quotations, this week, from great musicians and writers. This is from the composer Ernest Bloch: “Real music goes beyond the intentions of its author for it nourishes itself from a much deeper and more mysterious source than mere intellect. It represents a synthesis of all the vital forces, of all the hidden instincts of an individual...

For those of us who don’t play a brass instrument, watching brass players play always seems a bit like watching a magic show. We hear the French hornists, trumpeters, trombonists, and tuba players playing plenty of different notes, but the number of times they move their fingers—or in the case of trombonists their slides—doesn’t nearly add up to the number of notes. Not to mention the fact that where they put their fingers or slides doesn’t seem to bear any relation to which notes they’re

Here are the names of seven composers of Italian opera who were contemporaries of Giuseppe Verdi: Filippo Marchetti, Errico Petrella, Pietro Antonio Coppola, Luigi Ricci, Federico Ricci, Antonio Cagnoni, and Giovani Pacini. Ever heard of them? Neither had I. But among them, those seven composers wrote 172 operas. So why is it that Verdi’s operas have lasted, and those other 172 haven’t? Why do we still know Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore? Surely Verdi didn’t have a monopoly on talent. The

If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus, or the play it was based on, you may have gotten the impression that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was some sort of giggling idiot who just happened to be really good at writing music. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. Read a collection of Mozart’s letters and you discover a person who is serious, articulate, witty, and perceptive; someone who writes beautifully and can make jokes—sometimes very dirty jokes, it’s true—in at least three different

Sic transit gloria mundi – Thus passes worldly glory. Louis Spohr was born in Germany in 1784, and during his lifetime he was one of the most famous musicians in all of Europe, renowned as a great violinist, a distinguished conductor, and an extremely prolific composer. He wrote ten symphonies, ten operas, eighteen violin concertos, four clarinet concertos, and thirty-six string quartets, among dozens of other works, and along the way he found time to teach a couple of hundred violin students,

If you’d like a remarkable example of the genius of Leonard Bernstein, I recommend that you listen – or listen again – to the song “Cool,” from West Side Story. Bernstein needed a song for the character Riff to sing to build up the tension before the gang fight between the Jets and the Sharks. If I told you his solution was to take Baroque counterpoint – a fugue, to be precise – the syncopated rhythms of jazz, and the atonal twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg… and to mix them all

Every musician will tell you that there are some musicians who just seem to have better ears than others do. We’re really talking about the brain, rather than the actual organ of hearing, but in any case from the same sounds others hear, some people are able to extract more information, and they’re able both to process and to store that information faster, more accurately, and more efficiently. Yesterday I talked about ear training courses for musicians, and rigorous training can certainly lead

One of the reasons Mozart’s operas seem so profound to us is because they’re so true to life, and perhaps especially true to life’s complexities and contradictions. Take the character of Don Giovanni. He’s introduced to us having committed a sexual assault, which he follows by killing someone. But Mozart doesn’t make him a cartoon villain, and in fact he does the opposite: he makes him appealing—he gives him beautiful music to sing. But here’s what’s so fascinating – and such a stroke of genius

The tools and techniques of conducting have changed a great deal over the centuries. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the people who led musical performances, especially vocal performances, usually simply waved their hands in the air to indicate the shape and speed of melodies – although sometimes they also held a long wooden staff in one hand and marked beats with it. During the Baroque period and into the early Classical period, larger instrumental ensembles were usually led by a

One of the common dangers of studying composers’ lives is finding out that some of the people whose music we love and admire turn out to have been very unadmirable human beings. Exhibit A in this category is usually Richard Wagner, an egomaniac and anti-semite, among other things, but a man who wrote lots of exquisitely beautiful music. What are we to make of such jarring disjunctions? Should we throw out the music with the maniac? I don’t have the answer. If your personal association with the