Monday – Friday at 7:00 pm
Orchestral Heroes
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.
Orchestral Heroes
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, ...
Liszt, Franz
Firmly poised on the progressive side of the War of the Romantics, Liszt was on the front lines of the battle to usher in a new musical era: an era of radical dissonances, thematic transformation, and exceptional virtuosity. This week, we’ll spend five hours listening to Liszt’s music and life story. Some of his music is so familiar, like his ...
Emotion and Meaning in Music
Is music merely a collection of ordered pitches and vibrations in the air, or is there inherent and universal meaning contained within? Does music convey anger, longing, desire, or humor? This week Bill delves into one of the most mysterious and fundamental qualities of music: its ability to convey emotion to the listener. Starting with Gil Shaham with the New ...
