Monday – Friday at 7:00 pm
The Violin Concerto
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 Violin Concerto
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 ...
American Masters, Part IV
From the east coast to the west, American composers developed a singular identity in the 20th century that continues to energize and influence classical music. This week is dedicated to the not so popular American composers such as John Alden Carpenter, Marion Bauer, and Randall Thompson. Bill investigates their family history, what drove them to compose, and what artistic journey ...
Les Cinq Plus
This week’s theme: French composers from the generation before Les Six (Poulenc, Milhaud, Honegger, et al), and we are fondly calling our composers Les Cinq Plus. Like Les Six, our composers did not have a great deal in common, and the way they all have been grouped is an historical accident — artists who happened to inhabit a particular locale ...