Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Proud Tower, Part II
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.
Proud Tower, Part II
March 20, 2023
More music from the Gilded Age to the Great War. Bill picks up his exploration of music from the “banquet years” in the early 1900’s in Russia with music from Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov. We then travel to Paris to hear Cécile Chaminade and conclude in Austria with Mahler and Lehár. Our journey ends with The Rite of Spring, and as ...
Proud Tower, Part I
March 13, 2023
Bill gains his inspiration for these two weeks of Exploring Music from Barbara Tuchman’s book The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. This was a gilded age for music that brought us boldly into the 20th century. We will listen to music from many composers and their countries—Elgar from Britain, Schoenberg from Austria, and Bill ...
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, ...
A Visit with Violinist Arnold Steinhardt
March 27, 2023
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 ...