GOOD furniture needs good music. When furniture designer Khai Liew wanted to exhibit his latest creations for the SALA Festival, he called in the Zephyr Quartet to provide some furniture music.

Love the cello? Imagine what it’s like when a dozen come together to make sweet music.

REVIEWING Juilliard415 recently, my colleague James R. Oestreich puzzled over the name of this new period-instrument band and that of another Juilliard group, Ensemble ACJW. The meaning of the names didn’t stop him: as someone with a longstanding passion for early music, he would immediately have recognized 415 as an allusion to Baroque pitch.

The delight and surprise that followed composer Jennifer Higdon’s Pulitzer Prize win April 12 have reached beyond the artistic community to a wider public: We love tangible evidence that Philadelphia originates the better things in life, as well as importing them.

IN THE rarified world of old violins, the Stradivarius is commonly thought to be the very best. But for many connoisseurs and concert performers, the pinnacle is the work of a craftsman from Cremona in Italy known as Guarneri del Gesu.

FOR Jordi Savall — early-music pioneer and master of the viola da gamba — music is always more than fleeting sounds. It enfolds histories. It reflects worlds. To draw a distinction between musicology and the sheer joy of performance is next to impossible.

Forget Old Europe. Contemporary classical music takes its cues from around the globe. When it comes to classical music, for most people Europe is the epicentre of the tradition. If asked to imagine the sound world of a Russian piece for, say, violin and piano, it would not be a stretch to think of beautiful sweeping melodies accompanied by lush harmonies on the piano, a la Tchaikovsky.

AN Australian musician has become possibly the world’s greatest guitar teacher after placing his lessons on YouTube. Justin Sandercoe’s free online tutorials for beginner guitar players have been viewed more than 60 million times in the past four years.

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.

In 1890 a 13-year-old Spanish musical prodigy, Pablo Casals, was rummaging through a second-hand sheet-music store in Barcelona. He stumbled across a tattered copy of six cello suites by Johann Sebastian Bach. These pieces, written in the 1720s, had long been obscure. But for the young Pablo, their melodic beauty was audible.