Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Gershwin, George
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.
Gershwin, George
September 26, 2022
Join us for a week-long look at the life and soulful music of George Gershwin, including his Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and Porgy and Bess. A true American original, George Gershwin transcended musical categorization as he composed in almost any form: Broadway musicals, popular songs, symphonic works, and jazz. In only 38 years of life, Gershwin followed ...
String Quartets from Fibich to Sibelius
September 19, 2022
This week Bill broadens his considerations of the string quartet with an emphasis on lesser-known, late-19th century composers. He begins with Poème for violin and piano by Czech composer Zdeněk Fibich. Bill says “the music is familiar but the composer maybe not so familiar”: Poème was the score for one of the first choreographies by George Balanchine. Fibich was among ...
Distant Neighbors
September 12, 2022
Though we share a very long border with Latin America, we live in two very different worlds. Their history is thousands of years old, and ours is younger. Come on this journey with us to the deep and rich musical history of our neighbors to the south. Mexico’s early history of many indigenous cultures and its colonization by Spain in ...
Musical Landscapes
October 3, 2022
This week Exploring Music paints landscapes with music. We start in an outdoor café, listening to Placido Domingo sing Augustin Lara’s song about the Andalusian city Granada. Then our tour walks through the gardens with Manuel De Falla and rides the sea’s waves with Debussy. We’ll climb the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains to listen to Pepe Ramero play ...
Vaughan Williams, Ralph
October 10, 2022
Composer of nine masterful symphonies, editor of the English Hymnal, an ambulance driver in WWI and great-nephew to Charles Darwin, Ralph Vaughan Williams was a prolific and intriguing figure who was at the vanguard of English music in the early 20th century. This week, we’ll look at his life and sample his music.
