Monday – Friday at 7:00 pm
Symphony, Part 04
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 04
We start this week featuring the symphonic form at its Romantic apex, with Austrian composers Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler, and then cross the English Channel to Britain to listen the music of Edward Elgar. 22 symphonies among the three of them, and all the more remarkable since Bruckner was in his forties before he composed his first, and Elgar ...
Merrie England
Ready your passport! We’re travelling to Merrie England. Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Dowland, all wrote music based on the folk tunes in the country pubs, the pageantry of royal ceremonies, and the images of their beautiful countryside. Come open your ears and walk with us through the pathways of England. Greensleeves, Turtle Doves, and Dame Janet Baker. Britannia rules the waves!
Dvořák, Antonin
Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904) A five-part biography on the life of Bohemia’s most celebrated composer. Bill starts with Dvořák’s early compositions, and music from one of his first influences, Bedřich Smetana, and continues with his travels to America where he helped define our musical identity. Dvořák composed Symphony From the New World while living in the U.S. as director of the ...
