Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Symphony, Part 08
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.
Symphony, Part 08
This week, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Vaughan Williams will be featured, continuing our massive series in examining symphony compositions. The symphony is widely considered one of the most important forms of classical music. Our exploration this week continues with music from composers born around 1880.
Nationalism in Music
Nationalism on its own can be a dangerous force, but it has inspired a number of profound pieces of music. This edition of Exploring Music examines what happens when a powerful pride in national identity enters a composer’s head. Bill starts by reading an excerpt from an essay about the history of nationalism in music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, who ...
Great Choral Works, More Often Praised Than Listened To
Part of the fun with Exploring Music is making up titles for our various weeks. Bill came up with an outstanding doozy —Great Choral Works, More Often Praised Than Listened To— but not this week! We’ll hear St. Paul and Elijah, two huge oratorios written ten years apart by Felix Mendelssohn; A Sea Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and a ...