Bach, the composer as intellectual by Marco Moraes   But all at once it dawned on me that this Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream But topsy-turvical coincidence, Not flimsy

A tale of two cities. I have no idea when this handy name came about, but it is now used by the literati to compare pairs of cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, Suzhou and Hangzhou, and

A crazy 2010 has come to an end. It was the year of the Shanghai Expo and vuvuzelas, of positive events and negative happenings, and not least, lots and lots of music festivals. Apart from the countless music events and

For years, my New Year’s resolutions have looked like this: Get better grades; Find a handsome boyfriend; Increase revenues in my business; Lose some weight; Get married; Have a baby; Lose more weight; More babies; You get the idea. As

The Snowman and the Bear (City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong) 5PM, Sunday 5 December 2010. Concert Hall, HK City Hall As a pre-Christmas concert for children, featuring a narration of two children’s beloved tales with muted animation and a

In 1993, Dr Frances Rauscher and her colleagues from the Centre of Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, University of California published a letter in “Nature” magazine that shook the music world. The report suggested that listening to Mozart’s music could

I’m not sure what I was expecting when I decided to board Windstar Cruises for my first music cruise, but it definitely exceeded whatever I had in mind. To be frank, I boarded the cruise ship extremely naïve. For one,

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), the great German-English composer, was almost completely blind by 1751. As a result, he was unable to finish his final piece of music “Jephtha”. Handel was told by Samuel Sharp, an eye specialist at Guy’s hospital,