You want to travel with your guitar, but your luggage just won’t let you. How do you manage? The French inventor François Baschet ran into that problem when he wanted to travel after WWII. His guitar proving too big to

While the war years provided much opportunity for stirring patriotic films, the industry underwent a number of significant changes immediately following. With money in short supply, the lush symphonic scores of the Golden Age gradually declined, and composers started to

After having made his name in jazz, clarinetist Benny Goodman set out to make his name in classical music, feeling that he was likely to leave a longer impression in classical music than in jazz. To fill that need, he

The Bernadotte dynasty in Sweden was founded in 1818 when the French field marshal Jean Baptiste Bernadotte ascended the throne as Charles XIV John (Karl XIV Johan) of Sweden. How a French military leader rose to be head of Sweden

Climate change has been triggering a growing number of natural disasters worldwide. The tragedies, such as tornadoes, floods, and fire, cause death and unimaginable damage to peoples’ homes, their lives, and threaten the existence of wildlife around the globe. Music,

The Ukrainian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann (1885-1956) studied at the Imperial Conservatory of Music with the three greatest Russian composers of the late 19th-century: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Anton Arensky, and Sergei Taneyev after entering the conservatory at age 11. The first

Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in Different Instrumentations At the tragic conclusion to English composer Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, Aeneas has been given a message supposedly sent by the god Jove to leave Dido and Carthage and to

Sometimes composer break out of their box – make a new sound – make you hear music a new way – and sometimes it’s the performers who help as well. Take a listen to these performances and these interesting works