Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Franck, César
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.
Franck, César
February 6, 2023
Join us for a week of music from César Franck. Born in 1822 in Liège, Franck moved to Paris in 1835 and died there in 1890. He was initially known as a gifted improviser on the organ – and considered by some to be the greatest composer of organ music after J. S. Bach – but over time we have ...
A Visit with Richard Stoltzman
January 30, 2023
Descending into Richard’s daylight basement is stepping into over fifty years of clarinet history. Music scores, posters, photos, thousands of clarinet reeds, and over 175 of his recordings fill tables and shelves. With sweet overtones and a twinkle in his eye, he describes standing on stage, pointing the bell of his clarinet towards the audience, and drawing them into the ...
Janáček, Leoš
January 23, 2023
One of the most influential (and underrated) Czech composers, Leoš Janáček created a deeply original style of composition that infused his operas, string quartets, and symphonic music with Moravian and Slavic folk influences. We start this week listening to his charming intimate Nursery Rhymes, White Goat Gathers Pears and Beetroot Was Getting Married, performed by The Netherlands Wind Ensemble. Each ...
Tudor Music
February 13, 2023
The House of Tudor reigned from Henry VII through Elizabeth I, and during this time, the arts were loved and supported by church and state alike. This support gave rise to a new type of English secular music, music that was not folk music and didn’t belong to the church. Though the Tudor poets are better known than the composers, ...
Too Darn Big
February 20, 2023
This week we are ascending some of the most colossal musical mountains in existence — Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and Havergal Brian’s Gothic Symphony, these are works that are (usually) too big to program on Exploring Music. These compositions are not only long, but they require a “symphony of a thousand.” Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder will be performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra and ...
A Guitar Fest
February 27, 2023
A Guitar Fest on Exploring Music! The inspiration for this week came from a listener responding to Bill McGlaughlin’s call for new program ideas. This listener wrote that he would like to see one or more shows dedicated to Andrés Segovia and went on to say, “Of all musicians I have known, no one dominated the field as he did. ...
Millennium of Women in Music
March 6, 2023
Exploring Music embraces works written in honor of, and by, great women — Masses for the Virgin Mary, Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, and songs by Clara Schumann. This week we feature women performers and composers going back as far as we can find them in the history books — the Benedictine abbess-composer Hildegard of Bingen; Mozart’s friend, ...