Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Ballad of East and West
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.
Ballad of East and West
May 23, 2022
Borrowing this week’s title from the Rudyard Kipling poem, “The Ballad of East and West” will explore the music of Asia. Traveling to China, Japan, and Indonesia, we will listen to instruments, sounds, folk tunes and poetry. Some that are the unique musical voices that define a country’s identity, some that are shared in common and many that are borrowed ...
Artists in Exile, Part II
May 16, 2022
Bill continues to reflect on artists in exile, beginning with music from Paul Hindemith. In his escape from Nazi Germany, Hindemith traveled to Turkey, England, and Switzerland before coming to America. We will listen to his Symphony for Concert Band and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Bill then considers the plight of composers who faced deportation from America ...
Artists in Exile, Part I
May 9, 2022
Our two-week series titled Artists in Exile pays homage to Joseph Horowitz’s book that focuses on “how refugees from 20th-century war and revolution transformed the American arts.” In this program, you will hear stories of appreciation for a new country, but also of terrible loneliness that comes from being forced from one’s home by political strife. Bill begins this week ...
Mendelssohn, Felix
May 30, 2022
German composer Felix Mendelssohn finds himself at the center of this week’s episode of Exploring Music. He has been hailed as one of the greatest musical minds of all time. We venture from his precocious youth to his early death. His great body of work is still in the repertories of chamber groups and orchestras. And it’s the Mendelssohn Violin ...
Britten, Benjamin
June 6, 2022
Benjamin Britten’s works can be edgy, or they can be warm and accessible. On Monday we learn about Britten’s childhood, and the deep bond between him and his teacher, Frank Bridge. As the week continues, Bill introduces us to the influential people in his life, including Britten’s lifelong partner, tenor Peter Pears. We will hear Pears sing with virtuoso horn ...
