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

The Form is Alive and Well Given the myriad explorations and experiments in musical form and structure in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is perhaps surprising that the Piano Sonata has endured. While many of the most important composers

Concluding this series on Brahms’ late piano works, we have reached the last composition for solo piano by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) – Klavierstücke Op.119. It was written together with Op.118 during his stay in Bad Ischl in 1893. Consistent with

In America, we tend to think of music as something done by children, or professionals, or, perhaps done by adults who are still channeling their inner child (a nod to Mr. Jagger, now hitting a youthful 75). In other countries,

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

Alfred Brendel describes Schubert as “a sleepwalker”, yet in his final three sonatas, we see Schubert’s innate sense of musical geometry and his bold treatment of traditional sonata form. These are tightly-organised woks with almost perfectly-balanced structures, perhaps most obviously

I was in a shop recently and found BeepEgg, an egg timer that goes into the water with your eggs and lets you know when they’re done. I bought the one with Classical Music themes, called BeepEgg Nori, decorated with

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.