Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Tone Poems
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.
Tone Poems
May 12, 2025
Generally, tone poems use music to evoke the essence of a painting, a poem, or other non-musical source. In a literal case of art imitating life, symphonic music is freed from its traditional structures and takes a programmatic turn. Bill invites us to sit with him as he describes and listens to this image-evoking dramatic music in works like Ottorino ...
Schubert String Quartets
May 5, 2025
Bill continues his in-depth look at the string quartet’s history with the music of Franz Schubert. His quartets are unique and remarkable. From his early teens, Schubert loved composing quartets with surprising key relationships and complicated rhythms. These “tone puzzles” can be heard within quartet movements and throughout the complete piece. On Friday’s program Bill adds an extra cello to ...
Baltic Music
April 28, 2025
Many of us know and love the work of Jean Sibelius, Finland’s greatest musical export, but the countries around the Gulf of Finland have given us a wealth of composers, some better known than others. This week’s theme is music from this land of lakes and islands — isolated, self-contained, and full of beauty. Composers like Erkki Melartin, Leevi Madetoja, ...
American Masters, Part III
May 19, 2025
Our series celebrating American composers continues with more innovative works, visiting composers born in the first fifteen years of the 20th century. We hear some Lou Harrison with his love of Indonesian Gamelan music, George Rochberg’s tonal 3rd string quartet performed by the Concord Quartet, and Franz Waxman’s orchestral music. Don’t miss the special treat: Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter, performed ...
Treasure Hunt
May 26, 2025
EUREKA! This week Bill invites us to come along on a treasure hunt. We will dig deep into that overflowing box of CDs in the back of his front hall closet. He found many real treasures starting with a marvelous young Icelandic pianist, Vikingur Olafsson, and a beautiful recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with Leonidas Kavakos. This is a ...