Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
It Was a Lover and His Lass
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.
It Was a Lover and His Lass
February 10, 2025
We start every hour this week with a cheerful “Hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,” inspired by the incidental music in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Bill rounds out each day with many different composers’ works influenced by all aspects of love. These include from love songs in operas, Richard Wagner’s poetic chamber work Siegfried Idyll celebrating the ...
Orchestral Heroes
February 3, 2025
This week Bill explores a request from a listener in Philadelphia, who would like to hear solos and concerti from different members of the symphony orchestra. Bill feels orchestras are one of the great creations of humankind. One hundred musicians artfully blend together, but each instrumentalist has their own personality and spirit. Bill creates a fantastic playlist of clarinet, horn, ...
The Violin Concerto
January 27, 2025
There is a saying in much of eastern Europe, “Every child is born with a violin under their pillow”. Parents dream of their child becoming a great violinist, not a doctor or a lawyer as so many do in America. Most composers have written at least one violin concerto hoping to challenge the soloist while creating a work of beauty. We ...
Ports of Call, Part I
February 17, 2025
Once while traveling by train across the Alps, Gustav Mahler turned to his friend, a fellow composer, and said, “Don’t bother looking at the view; I have already composed it.” For the next two weeks, Exploring Music will present sounds from composers’ backyards and hear their journaling voyages to distant lands: from the bird calls in the Amazon jungle expressed ...
Ports of Call, Part II
February 24, 2025
This week on Exploring Music, we will continue traveling with composers around the world. Music from around the globe varies as much as languages do. Many of us can identify the country where a composition was written before we can name the composer who wrote it. You can’t separate the composer from his background. Listen to them express the sounds ...