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On This Day
17 May: Erik Satie Was Born
Eric Alfred Leslie Satie, who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was born at nine in the morning of 17 May 1866 in the coastal town of Honfleur. He was the son of a Scottish mother, née Jane Leslie
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In Praise of the Classical Music Nerd
A nerd is a person seen as overly intellectual, obsessive, [or] introverted…. Such a person may spend inordinate amounts of time on unpopular, little known, or non-mainstream activities, which are generally either highly technical, [or] abstract….to the exclusion of more
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On This Day
15 May: Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Was Premiered
In 1917, Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso made an excursion to Naples, with the composer commenting on its “half Spanish character, on the pleasure he found in the aquarium, and in the Neapolitan watercolors.” They also attended a commedia dell’arte
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Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance
“Regal Pageantry”
Like countless people around the world, I recently settled in to watch at least part of the coronation of Charles III and Queen Camilla. This ceremony has great tradition and theatricality, from the arrival of the golden carriage to the
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On This Day
14 May: Otto Klemperer was Born
When famed conductor Otto Klemperer was roughly nine years of age, he encountered “the man who was to be the central inspiration of his entire life as a musician.” He remembers “seeing Mahler on the street when I was quite
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5 Composers Who Died in the Holocaust Who You Need to Know
The impact of the loss of life under the Nazi regime was incalculable. One of the only ways we can begin to comprehend the scale of the destruction is by looking at the impact that the Holocaust had on individual
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Wearing Your Music on Your Gown
The 2023 Met Gala brought out all kinds of dresses, including Karl Lagerfeld’s 40-year-old violin dress, designed in 1983 for Chloé, worn here by Olivia Wilde. But Lagerfeld wasn’t the only designer to find his inspiration in the instruments of
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On This Day
12 May: Gabriel Fauré Was Born
Gabriel Fauré was born on 12 May 1845 in the small town of Pamiers, in the department of Ariège, in the south of France. He was the youngest of six children born to Toussaint-Honoré Fauré (1810–85) and Marie-Antoinette-Hélène Lalène-Laprade (1809–87),
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