Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
American Masters, Part I
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.
American Masters, Part I
June 5, 2023
The first week in our series exploring great but lesser-known American composers: all born in the last decade of the 19th century. These are composers whose names are not Ellington, Gershwin, Copland, Barber, or Bernstein — Howard Hanson from Wahoo, Nebraska; Walter Piston from Rockland, Maine; William Grant Still born in Woodville, Mississippi; and Ruth Crawford Seeger born in East ...
Elgar, Edward
May 29, 2023
There’s much more to Edward Elgar than graduation marches and the Enigma Variations. A composer of equally masterful symphonies, oratorios, chamber music, and concertos, he led a renaissance in 20th century England that firmly re-established its musical identity. Don’t miss the last installment of the week when Bill features the “English Rose”, Jacqueline Du Pre in her legendary performance of ...
Families of Instruments
May 22, 2023
Here we are exploring the families of instruments within the orchestra. They are all represented in the orchestral score. The score is a big blueprint that a composer creates and gives to the conductor to supervise the construction of his piece. It has individual instructions for every player and instrument section. For this week’s program, we will follow score order ...
Class of 1809: Six composers born over a five-year period 1809 – 1813
June 12, 2023
Our six extraordinary composers are Felix Mendelssohn, born February 3, 1809; Frederic Chopin, March 3, 1810; Robert Schumann, June 8, 1810; Franz Liszt, October 22, 1811; Richard Wagner, May 22, 1813; and Giuseppe Verdi, October 10, 1813. 1809 also brought the death of Papa Haydn and the birth of Abraham Lincoln, plus Beethoven wrote Les Adieux “Farewell,” and the Emperor ...