Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Walton, William
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. Listen to the past two weeks of Exploring Music here.
Walton, William
Composer Benjamin Britten once wrote that hearing William Walton’s music was a “great turning point in his musical life.” We’ll trace the arc of Walton’s life and his associations with the greatest artists of his time, including Heifetz, Hindemith, Olivier, and Beecham. Bill features Walton’s love of different musical genres; Film music from Henry V, the poem Façade set to ...
Top Shelf I
Closing in on twenty years, Bill has been collecting and programming music for Exploring Music. However, many of his favorite recordings don’t find their way into a thematic week of EM and end up orphaned on a top shelf in his back room. These are special recordings that wait and wait for the right theme, and it begins to feel ...
From the Mountains to the Sea
Sweeping expansive music that expresses the breadth of land- and seascapes, with a sense of coming together to where these elements touch each other—land meeting water, mountain stretching to heavens above, and distant horizons where oceans and skies blend. We’ll journey to islands with fiery volcanoes and molten earth, and in the quiet of the night sit on soft grass ...