Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Bruckner, Anton
Exploring Music is an adventure — an expedition through the world of classical music. We pick a theme each week 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 Bill McGlaughlin as our guide to make sure we all get home safe and sound.
Listeners' emailed suggestions have played a very important role in choosing 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.
The player below features a continuous five hour loop of the most recent Exploring Music episode.
Bruckner, Anton
October 7, 2024
This latest addition to our composer biography series honors Anton Bruckner on the 200th anniversary year of his birth. Bruckner, a devout Roman Catholic, spent years as a chorister at the Monastery of St. Florian and later he served as the cathedral organist in Linz, where he established a reputation for his improvisatory skills. He composed dozens of choral settings ...
How Strange the Change from Major to Minor, Part II
September 30, 2024
When our listener wrote asking Bill to describe the different scales and modes in music, he said a week ought to do it. Bill quickly realized that a week ought NOT to do it, and two weeks were better! So, this week we continue listening to music change from major to minor, plus harmonic surprises that composers add to their ...
How Strange the Change from Major to Minor, Part I
September 23, 2024
“There’s no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor.” – Cole Porter This two-week series comes from a listener who wrote asking about the different scales in Western music. You may know of major and minor scales and hear the change of mood that composers can achieve by transitioning between them, but there are five ...
Symphony, Part VI (French Symphonies)
October 14, 2024
The symphony has been fertile ground for composers throughout history and around the world. This week, we’ll follow its development in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Your listeners will enjoy Georges Bizet’s well-liked Symphony in C through to the lesser-known Symphony in C of Paul Dukas.
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)
October 21, 2024
Shakespeare valued rhythm, meter, and harmonies in music and utilized these elements in his plays and poetry. This week, Bill has programmed musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s works for the stage and screen. The queue includes a suite from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the Berlin Philharmonic and excerpts from William Walton’s score for the film Henry V narrated ...
