A Minute with Miles

In May of 1761, Benjamin Franklin was in Cambridge, England, and he heard a man play a performance on musical glasses. They were crystal wine glasses filled with different levels of water, and when the performer rubbed the edges of the glasses, they produced different notes. Franklin was entranced by the sound, and he invented a mechanical version of the musical glasses that he called the glass armonica – that’s harmonica without the H. Franklin’s instrument consisted of a set of glass bowls

Galileo, whose full name was Galileo Galilei, was one of the great figures in the history of science. What may surprise you is that Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, was one of the great figures in the history of Western music. The elder Galilei was a lutenist, singer, and composer, but most importantly he was a theorist. In a book called Dialogue of Ancient and Modern Music, published in 1581, he laid out the theory of what came to be known as monody, the style of music that features a solo

Musicians tend to tell lots of stories about funny things that have happened on stage during concerts. Often the stories are about disasters or near-disasters, and to be honest, they usually seem much funnier later on than the events themselves felt when they were actually happening. But one of the funniest stories I know isn’t about a disaster. It was told to me by the former second violinist of a very famous string quartet. The quartet had played a concert one night, had been up very late, and

In chamber music from the Baroque period, the written parts for keyboard instruments -- the harpsichord and the organ, for example – often consisted of merely a bass line, with numbers written under the notes. Such a bass line was called a “figured bass,” and the numbers, or figures, indicated which chords the keyboard player was expected to fill in above the bass, while at the same time improvising melodies [or countermelodies] to go along with what the other instruments were playing. The

In some ways composers are like chefs – they’re always looking for interesting or even exotic flavors. Or like painters, experimenting with compelling colors and color combinations. And percussion instruments, whether alone or in combination, have always been very useful ingredients for adding flavor and color to orchestral compositions. Contemporary composers have been especially enthusiastic in their use of percussion instruments, sometimes calling for whole stages full of instruments that are

By the late 1700s, the piano had replaced the harpsichord as the primary keyboard instrument for solo compositions, concertos, and chamber music. Lovers of Baroque music may not like to hear this, but for most musicians of the time—of the late 1700s, that is—this replacement represented progress. And the reason it represented progress was that the piano offered possibilities for sound production, and sound variation, that the harpsichord couldn’t match. When you press the keys on a harpsichord,

When it comes to Spanish composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the three most important names are certainly Isaac Albeniz, Enrique Granados, and Manuel de Falla – all composers who brilliantly integrated Spanish folk influences into the Western classical tradition. All three were great pianists, and Albeniz and Granados in particular had important careers as solo performers. Both those men, in fact, continued the long tradition of the composer/virtuosos who enriched the solo piano

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,