In the bad old days of symphony orchestras in this country, music directors were absolute dictators, and orchestra musicians had few protections. If a music director woke up in a bad mood and decided to fire an orchestra musician on the spot, he could… never mind that it might instantly deprive that musician of his livelihood. And some of the most famous conductors, unfortunately, were egotistical tyrants who inspired as much fear as admiration in the members of their orchestras. It wasn’t until

We tend to be reluctant these days to say that one piece of music is better than another or that one composer is better than another. Often this reluctance is a good idea, especially if the ranking serves no useful purpose, and because “better” is sometimes hard to define. But sometimes the reluctance is a mistake, and it’s a mistake based on confusing taste with judgment . You’re perfectly entitled, for example, to prefer the works of Salieri to those of Mozart, if that’s your taste. But if you

If you’re a flutist, you almost certainly know the name “Philippe Gaubert.” But if you’re not a flutist, you probably don’t. And yet Philippe Gaubert was one of the most famous and important French musicians of the first half of the twentieth century. As a teenager in the 1890s, Gaubert studied the flute at the Paris Conservatory with the great French flutist Paul Taffanel, and eventually the signature style of the legendary teacher and his brilliant pupil became known as “the French method.”

I don’t suppose you have a pair of four-hundred-year-old pliers in your kitchen tool drawer, or a screwdriver made in the 1700s? No, probably not. Tools don’t tend to last that long. The tools of string players, though, are an entirely different story. I’ve played many concerts with a violinist whose violin was made in about 1600 and whose bow probably dates from the late 1700s, and just recently I played with a cellist whose three-hundred-and-forty-five-year-old cello is one of the most

Have you by any chance been hanging on to your grandparents’ old 78 rpm records? Carting them around, perhaps, and storing them on shelves or in boxes whenever you’ve moved from place to place? And perhaps thinking or hoping that after a hundred years your carefully preserved recordings of such fabulously famous artists as Enrico Caruso, Nellie Melba, and Mischa Elman must surely be valuable? Well, I’ve got good news and bad news for you. The good news is that you’re fortunate to have lovely

My cousin Stephen and his wife, Kim Lee, are scientists, and they’ve developed a malaria vaccine that may one day save millions of lives. It’s taken them years of intense effort and many disappointments along the way, but the results could one day change the world. And what do I do? I play music… Wars rage and diseases spread, all over the world, and I play music. Sometimes I feel like Nero – fiddling while Rome burns. Then again… I like to believe that for most people, and except for those in

There are many great creative artists, including great composers, who have been mediocre human beings, not to mention any number who have been downright reprehensible human beings, or human beings whose private views we would find reprehensible if only we knew what they were. It’s all less troubling with minor or insignificant artists—if we don’t like who they are, or were, we can comfortably ignore them, and it’s no great loss. But genius complicates things. Should we vow never to look at the

The guitar, the lute, and the viola da gamba all have frets. Have you ever wondered why? Well I can tell you this: it’s not so that the players can find the notes. Think about it: violinists and violists do without frets, and even cellists and double bass players, whose strings are as long or longer than those of the guitar, find their notes just fine without frets. But the guitar, the lute, and the members of the viola da gamba family are much less powerful than the members of the modern violin

Have you ever wondered why, when we’re feeling sad, or lonely, or downright miserable, we usually prefer to listen to music that somehow reflects our mood, rather than music that might jar us out of it? Personally, I think it’s because in our darker moods we’re not , in fact, looking to be told that everything’s really just fine in this bright and shiny world and that we’re wrong to be feeling the way we do. We try not to tell our children that their feelings are “wrong,” so why should we tell

If you like beautiful old keyboard instruments, not to mention beautiful small museums, I strongly recommend that you pay a visit to the Carolina Music Museum, in Greenville South Carolina. The museum is housed in a former Coca Cola bottling plant, and the collection features more than forty English, European, and American harpsichords and pianos dating from 1570 to 1845. They’re all playable, they all have fascinating individual histories, and they’ve all been refurbished and restored to