Monday – Friday at 7:00 pm
A Green and Pleasant Land
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.
Green and Pleasant Land
With William Blake’s famous words as a stepping-off point, we’re traversing the pastoral musical landscapes of the British Isles. Bill opens with a reading of Hilaire Belloc’s idyllic essay, “The Mowing of a Field.” We continue with a piece written by Patrick Hadley on the occasion of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 70th birthday, as well as one of Vaughan Williams’s folk ...
Maiden Voyages
Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn, and Dmitri Shostakovich are titans of music, but, as Bill considers their first symphonic efforts, he reveals the adversities and ordeals of each composer attempting to develop their individual musical voices. Maiden voyages into the deep of music, including Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, and Symphony No. 1 by Sergei ...
A Visit with Violinist Arnold Steinhardt
Exploring Music spent a couple of marvelous days with one of the world’s violin giants, Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist for 45 years of the Guarneri Quartet. This week will feature Arnold talking about his youth in L.A., his time with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, his studies with Josef Szigeti, and his time with the Guarneri Quartet. Arnold was ...
