Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Maiden Voyages
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.
Maiden Voyages
January 20, 2025
Ludwig van Beethoven, Joseph Haydn, Felix Mendelssohn, and Dmitri Shostakovich are titans of music, but, as Bill considers their first symphonic efforts, he reveals the adversities and ordeals of each composer attempting to develop their musical voices. Maiden voyages into the deep of music, include Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” and Symphony No. 1 by ...
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
January 13, 2025
A child prodigy later hailed by Liszt as “the greatest organist in the world,” Camille Saint-Saëns led a fascinating life filled to the brim with music. We will sample his five symphonies, five piano concertos, operas, operettas, incidental music, and chamber music, as well as many piano and solo organ works. Bill’s playlist will delight you, including The Carnival of ...
With a Little Bit of Pluck
January 6, 2025
This week’s title is a play on words inspired by the song “With a Little Bit of Luck” from the musical My Fair Lady. Bill replaces the word “luck” with “pluck” to refer to instruments where the strings are plucked, such as the guitar, lute, mandolin, and pipa. There are approximately 170 plucked instruments around the world that fit this ...
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 ...
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, ...
