No — music is not finished, but when you listen to a piece of music, you are hearing the history of music and the people who have lived and created it. The importance of music cannot be overstated. Yehudi Menuhin

Practice and practising is what musicians do. It’s the bulk of their “work” and must be undertaken with an almost clockwork regularity in order to learn new music, hone skills and keep existing repertoire going. The traditional view is of

Politicians in particular talk a lot about the “weight of history” or of feeling “the hand of history on our shoulders”, especially when faced with a serious national crisis or significant policy decision.

Musicians and composers should be good at puzzles, because music is like an enigma.

Music may not be the oldest profession in the world, but it still hasn’t lost its magic. At five I received a fife as a birthday present. I thought it was a flute, it sounded like one. It gave me

“….never had I had a piano teacher so demanding and tyrannical” – Leonard Bernstein on Isabelle Vengerova The composer Philip Glass described her as somewhere “between intimidating and terrifying” whose lessons invariably left students “shaken and silent”, while Virgil Thomson

The language of music is vast, however, just like the many spoken languages of the world, not all music will speak a dialect you can easily understand. What is in the music that you and I love that speaks so

The title of this post is a quote from the British actor Michael Caine‘s memoirs which he read on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. The phrase was first mentioned when he was describing setbacks in his early career