If you listen to Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from the Nutcracker, you are acutely aware of a silvery, ethereal and otherworldly sound coming from the orchestra. That sound, similar to that of the glockenspiel—a percussion instrument composed

The time you spend with a stand partner in an orchestra frequently exceeds the time you spend with your spouse. I had three long-term stand partners all vastly different in approaches. My first stand partner was the veteran and irascible

It’s hard to imagine someone who called the music of Kurt Weill (the composer of ‘Mack the Knife’) ‘drivel’ eventually writing musicals and popular songs himself. Yet for Marc Blitzstein, this huge shift in aesthetic was just the start –

What are my impressions of Poland? The deadly WWII, Holocaust and Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima… Throughout my college years, this country always appeared to me as miserable. This year in March, after a month long struggle, I finally

Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, has just been released and there’s that curious phrase in the title: “Years of Pilgrimage.” The reference, of course, is to Franz Liszt’s celebrated piano works about his

I’m still a little bit scared of Alma Mahler. I can feel her gigantic personality looming over me, transcending the years, inevitably offering some acid-tongued rebuke at my futile attempts to capture this complex and volatile person in writing. When

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” Voltaire was certainly right on the money about warfare and humanity. And he was also right about the

What’s the scariest monster in the closet for musicians? (I must whisper here) THE AUDITION. Any job interview inspires some trepidation, of course, but THE AUDITION— so brief, so dicey, so seemingly random— brings on tremendous doubt, misgivings and even