Playing Along with The Mozart Effect
If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, you need to be a participant, not just a listener.
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Audiences Hate Modern Classical Music Because Their Brains Cannot Cope
Modern classical music is so widely disliked by audiences because the human brain struggles to find patterns it needs to understand the compositions as music.
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Metropolitan Opera Hikes its Ticket Prices
The Metropolitan Opera, which announced its plans for the 2010-11 season on Monday, said Mr. Sellars would make his directing debut at the house with “Nixon in China,” John Adams’s 1987 opera. Meanwhile, a Zeffirelli production — “La Traviata” — will bite the dust.
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Prelude to a Hit
CLASSICAL music is cool again. How do we know? Because cool people say so. Alex James, the bassist with Brit-pop superstars Blur, wrote in the British tabloid The Sun that “classical music isn’t just for snobs … Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet is great lovemaking music, better than Foo Fighters. You’re talking a different class of shag.”
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Classical Cutups For April Fools’ Day
It’s that time of year again, when practical jokers have a field day. Good-humored horseplay seems prevalent in cultures everywhere, even — according to Morning Edition commentator Miles Hoffman — within the hallowed halls of classical music.
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Software Helps Novices Pick Up Instruments
It fuses intricate classical music compositions and the simplistic iconography of a PlayStation. It allows the most unmusical people to play Beethoven in minutes. It has caused a revolution in how music is taught across Europe. And now it is making waves in Scottish schools.
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After 200 Years, Chopin’s Music Still Holds Mysteries
Monday, Feb. 22, is Frédéric Chopin’s 200th birthday. That is, it’s Fryderyk Chopin’s birthday; the Polish-born, Paris-dwelling composer’s name is more commonly spelled these days with Ys. And that’s his birth date according to a baptismal certificate; the composer said he was born on March 1. Even 200 years after his birth, things that appear simple about Chopin are actually more complicated than they seem.
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Song Returns Speech to Stroke Victims’ Lips
American scientists have restored speech to stroke victims by getting them to sing words instead of speaking them, a leading neurologist said.
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Frédéric Chopin, Never forgotten
TWO centuries ago an elfin musical prodigy, Frédéric Chopin, was born in a village near Warsaw. At 11, he dazzled the Russian tsar, Alexander I, with his own piano music. His poetic performances continued to enthrall; at 22, he was at the pinnacle of Parisian society.
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Bernstein on the Mystery Behind the Music
Imagine this: you drop onto the sofa on a Sunday afternoon, switch on the TV and see a dapper young man with a baton standing before an orchestra and demonstrating the patterns conductors use to lead music in different meters — two, three, four and five beats to the bar.
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