Exploring Music with Bill McGlaughlin

Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm

It Was a Lover and His Lass

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.

It Was a Lover and His Lass

February 10, 2025

We start every hour this week with a cheerful “Hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,” inspired by the incidental music in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Bill rounds out each day with many different composers’ works influenced by all aspects of love. These include from love songs in operas, Richard Wagner’s poetic chamber work Siegfried Idyll celebrating the ...

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, ...

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 ...