Monday – Friday at 7:00 pm
The Viola
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.
The Viola
A weeklong celebration of the exquisite music written for this “inner voice”. The viola is the middle sister of the stringed instruments, sitting between the violins and the cellos, and playing in a clef written just for her. The viola is often misunderstood and mistaken for a “larger violin” or sometimes either forgotten about or made the butt of jokes. ...
From This Mighty River: Music of the Children of J S Bach
Music flowed from the Bach family in a seemingly never-ending torrent for generations, and three sons of Johann Sebastian are no exception. This week we’ll listen to the music of Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Johann Christian Bach as they continue their father’s legacy into the Classical era. Exploring Music will follow CPE Bach as he travels to England ...
Maestros, Part II
The second week in a series highlighting a marvelous group of conductors who came from Europe from the 1930s to the 1970s, and transformed the American musical culture. We will listen to the conducting of Antal Doráti, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Bruno Walter, Maurice Abravanel, William Steinberg, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf, and even the lad from Lawrence, Massachusetts, Leonard Bernstein. All of ...
