The composer, conductor and educator Bernhard Sekles (1872-1934) caused a minor scandal in 1928. Sekles was director of the Hoch Conservatory of Music in Frankfurt am Main, and he decided to put Jazz on the curriculum. The courses in the

This atmospheric piece for solo piano, whose Afrikaans subtitle ‘Wind oor die Branders’ translates as Wind over the Waves, is by Richard Pantcheff, a British composer, born in 1959. It comes from ‘Nocturnus’, a suite of six pieces written for

The best teachers want to be made redundant – that is, they aim to make their students confident, independent musicians. In other words, they want to encourage autonomy in their students. As a teacher, perhaps the simplest way to encourage

For years, film and television producers and writers have been using classical music to make their work more memorable. It should come as no surprise that some of our earliest memories of classical music might be from the cartoons we

The title of this article is a quote from Robert Schumann’s ‘Advice to Young Musicians’, a cornucopia of practical advice and poetic words of wisdom for young people beginning their musical education, which still has plenty of relevance for musicians

What’s your “guilty pleasure music”? That is, music or a composer that you’d rather keep quiet about in case your highbrow, classical music-loving friends look down on you. Mine is Philip Glass – although I don’t feel remotely embarrassed about

The violinist and composer Amanda Röntgen-Maier (1853–1894) created a sensation when she became Sweden’s first-ever female Director of the Music at the Conservatory in Stockholm in 1872. Maier decided to continue her private studies in Leipzig with the concertmaster of

In the Renaissance, the musical score didn’t exist. Each singer received their own part book and sang from it. In this 17th century painting, we see the singers and players gathered around the table, each with a separate book in