In a world of instant musical gratification, where tunes from any genre or artist are available at the click of a mouse, can classical music remain relevant to the digital generation?

Philip Sheppard has just recorded every known national anthem for use at the Olympic Games. The man deserves a medal, says Adam Sweeting.

Did you know the Congo national anthem asks: “And if we have to die/ Does it really matter?” Here are more facts about national anthems.

New research finds a shift in emphasis in pop song lyrics over the decades, from “we” to “me.”

LONDON – Gustav Holst was far from being a one-hit wonder, but ask most people to name many works other than “The Planets” and they will hard pressed to think of any. At the same time, “The Planets” has been such a blistering success that familiarity has bred, if not contempt, a lack of appreciation for its depths as a work. That is the thinking behind a new film by Tony Palmer, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” named after Holst’s popular hymn tune.

Report concludes that Sistema Scotland project to immerse deprived children in classical music is having a positive effect and can achieve ‘social transformation’.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — A collection of Frederic Chopin’s letters telling of the Polish composer’s daily life, from giving lessons to the hot chocolate he drank, has gone on display in Warsaw’s Chopin museum more than six decades after it went missing.

The world’s most spectacular opera house has just opened in China – but it could have been built in Cardiff. Jonathan Glancey reports on Zaha Hadid’s stunning new project.

Humanity’s musical treasures — Beethoven piano sonatas, Schubert songs, Mozart symphonies and the like — come to life in performance. But they truly survive as black marks on a page, otherwise known as scores. Now a Web site founded five years ago by a conservatory student, then 19 years old, has made a vast expanse of this repertory available, free.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Music, said he could not bear dining to an accompaniment of “idiotic pop” and left without eating. The walk-out is his latest stand in a campaign to have piped “muzak” banned from restaurants, hotels and shops.