Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Dvorak, Tchaikovsky & Borodin String Quartets
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.
Dvorak, Tchaikovsky & Borodin String Quartets
Our multiple-part series tracing the evolution of the string quartet continues with magnificent works from Antonin Dvořák, Peter Tchaikovsky, and Alexander Borodin. During the 1870s and 1880s, well into the Romantic period, string quartets were falling by the wayside for a lot of composers, but a few managed to slip through the fabric of time and tell stories just as ...
Clash of the Titans, Part II
This week Exploring Music profiles three more “divine” beings— Maestros Pierre Monteux (1874-1964), Fritz Reiner (1888-1963), and Serge Koussevitzky (1874-1951): three world-renowned conductors who seemed to have descended from the Greek gods. After World War I, these conductors settled in America and took on the responsibility of nurturing the artistry of American composers and American orchestras: the native Frenchman Monteux ...
American Masters, Part II
The second in a multi-week series celebrating American composers from the first half of the 20th century. Bill starts with an American Impressionist, Charles T. Griffes, who admired Ravel, Scriabin and other fin de siècle composers. Bill ends this week with an entire hour devoted to the works of David Diamond – a student of Nadia Boulanger in 1930s Paris, ...