Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Schumann, Robert (1810-1856)
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.
Schumann, Robert (1810-1856)
April 21, 2025
A musical biography of the torrid life of one of Germany’s early romantics. Married to composer/pianist Clara Wieck, and a friend to Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, and Joseph Joachim, Schumann was at the very heart of the German Romantic intellectual movement in the mid-nineteenth century. He was a composer, pianist, and music critic. This week we will listen to Maurizio ...
Dona Nobis Pacem (Grant Us Peace)
April 14, 2025
Recently, Bill was staying at a beautiful little home in an oak forest in Massachusetts, near the Connecticut River. There had been tremendous thunderstorms through the night, but when he awoke that Sunday morning, the sun was shining, and the birds were singing. He thought what we need in the world is more days of peace and joy. So, this ...
Symphony, Part 01
April 7, 2025
In the beginning, there were Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, or so we thought. That is until we uncovered a whole world of instrumental music so varied, so wonderful, and so woefully unknown, Bill decided to take time in that glorious place. Starting with a sinfonia by Biaggio Marini from 1618, we slowly make our way through the seventeenth and eighteenth ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...