Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Clash of the Titans, 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. Listen to the past two weeks of Exploring Music here.
Clash of the Titans, Part I
August 8, 2022
Titans in Greek Mythology were great divine beings that descended from the Gods, hence someone who dominates his field. This week Bill McGlaughlin examines the lives and music-making of two such divine beings, Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, who both captured the minds and hearts of us at a crucial part in our country’s development.
American Masters, Part VII
August 1, 2022
American Masters, Part VII, is the seventh week in our series celebrating twentieth-century American composers. Bill is very fond of this series and calls it American Masters in honor of the fabulous PBS TV series that examines the lives and the creative process of artists. This week we have arrived at the composers born between the two World Wars (1918 ...
Symphony, Part 04
July 25, 2022
We start this week featuring the symphonic form at its Romantic apex, with Austrian composers Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler, then we cross the English Channel to Britain to listen to the music of Edward Elgar. Twenty-two symphonies among the three of them, and more remarkable since Bruckner was in his forties before he composed his first, and Elgar had ...
Game of Pairs, Part I
August 15, 2022
Haydn and Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms, Copland and Bernstein — these are just a few of the legendary artistic partnerships that have changed the course of musical history. Bill explores the ways in which composers learn from the musicians who came before them. We’ll hear music from Vivaldi and how he influenced a young J.S. Bach, including in the Brandenburg ...
Game of Pairs, Part II
August 22, 2022
Our two-week series focusing on legendary partnerships between composers continues. This week starts in Paris with French impressionist composers Debussy and Ravel, focusing on their respective quartets. Bill then explores the friendship between Béla Bartôk and Zoltan Kodály, in particular their love of Hungarian folk music. In the middle of the week Bill tips his hat to the title of ...