A Minute with Miles

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

I play concerts for a living , so you wouldn’t think I’d need reminding of the dramatic difference between listening to a recording and hearing a live performance. But it was as an audience member, recently, not as a performer, that I had my reminder – and it was a pretty spectacular one, because I was lucky enough to attend a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra played music by Schubert and Carl Maria von Weber, and they premiered a wonderful new piece by my good friend Max

The year 2018 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein’s life was, more dramatically and certainly more publicly than most, a life of dualities. He grew up on music of the synagogue, but also on jazz. He was a conductor, and also a composer; a classical composer, and also a Broadway composer; a great teacher and completely devoted servant of music, and also an extraordinarily egotistical exhibitionist; a lover of women and also of men; an astonishingly self

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.

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.

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?

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, SC. 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.