Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
An expedition through the world of classical music.
Exploring Music is an adventure. Each week, we pick a theme and follow the music wherever it leads us. Over the years we’ve explored Shakespeare and music, have followed the lives of many composers (a sort of five-part mini-series), and visited the music of various locales — Paris, Venice, Spain, Hungary, the Pacific Rim. Each five-episode program is a musical journey that focuses on a particular genre, music festival, or classical theme. It’s a sort of Outward Bound for music, with the host as our guide to make sure we all get home safe and sound.
Listeners' emailed suggestions have played an important role in selecting themes. We’ve recorded over two hundred adventures, and the ideas keep turning up. We don’t think we’ll exhaust the possibilities. Exploring Music is familiar and welcoming, and is where you feel at home on your first visit and can’t wait to get back to sample what the series has come up with for its next five-episodes.
Symphony, Part IV
July 13, 2026
We start this week featuring the symphonic form at its Romantic apex, with Austrian composers Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler. Then we’ll head over to Britain to enjoy the music of Edward Elgar. Together, these three composers wrote 22 symphonies, which is impressive considering Bruckner didn’t compose his first until his forties, and Elgar was turning fifty! Get ready for ...
Voices from the East
July 6, 2026
A single bell rings steadily, creating a calm, meditative mood. Gradually, the strings join in, playing canonic scales that shimmer through the music. This first piece in Voices from the East, is Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Over the week, we’ll explore music by composers from the Baltic states, travel to Chistopol in western ...
Gershwin, George
June 29, 2026
Join us for a week-long look at the life and soulful music of George Gershwin, including his Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and Porgy and Bess. A true American original, George Gershwin transcended musical categorization as he composed in almost any form: Broadway musicals, popular songs, symphonic works, and jazz. In only 38 years of life, Gershwin followed ...
Get the Picture
July 20, 2026
Listen your way through the works of composers inspired by well-known paintings and poems. Pianist Alicia de Larrocha will perform Goyescas, by Enrique Granados, a musical transcription of Francisco Goya’s paintings. This week’s music includes Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter), and Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead. Many of these musical works have gone ...
String Quartets from Fibich to Sibelius
July 27, 2026
This week Bill broadens his considerations of the string quartet with an emphasis on lesser-known, late-19th century composers. He begins with Poème for violin and piano by Czech composer Zdeněk Fibich. Bill says “the music is familiar but the composer maybe not so familiar”: Poème was the score for one of the first choreographies by George Balanchine. Fibich was among ...
Boulanger, Nadia
July 27, 2026
“Every town in the United States had a five-and-dime and a Boulanger student,” Virgil Thomson once said, and he wasn’t far off. Nadia Boulanger taught and influenced an entire generation of musicians, from Aaron Copland and Ástor Piazzolla to Philip Glass and Quincy Jones, and this week we’ll hear some of her compositions and performances alongside those of her prolific ...
