Monday - Friday at 7:00 pm
Strauss, Richard (1864-1949)
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.
Strauss, Richard (1864-1949)
June 10, 2024
Richard Strauss – whose musical life spanned nine decades, two world wars, and the Third Reich – was one of Germany’s most gifted and controversial figures. We’ll explore his tone poems, operas, and both his public and private lives. We end this five-part biography with his Four Last Songs performed by Jessye Norman with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by ...
Child’s Play
June 3, 2024
In hundreds of years of music-making, childhood remains an inexhaustible inspiration. This week, we’ll hear how composers from Purcell to Prokofiev were influenced by the creative energy of youth. Plus, we will hear the music of young composers and listen to great artists captured during their tender years. Bill says, “In short, we are going to see if we can’t ...
Exploring Theme and Variations
May 27, 2024
This week is a grand adventure exploring two towering sets of variations, one from Johann Sebastian Bach and one from Ludwig van Beethoven. Our first three episodes will focus on Bach’s work published in 1741, and the title page reads, “A Keyboard exercise, consisting of an ARIA with diverse variations for harpsichord with two manuals and composed for music lovers, ...
Invitation to the Dance, Part I
June 17, 2024
Which came first, the composition or the dance? Can we even pull them apart? It’s hard to say, but this week we’ll follow the dance through solo works, the opera, and the symphony. We will listen to Medieval dances and Strauss waltzes, Bach gigues and Chopin Mazurkas, plus Haydn minuets and Mahler Ländler.
The Viola
June 24, 2024
A weeklong celebration of the exquisite music written for this “inner voice.” The viola is the middle sister of the stringed instruments, sitting between the violins and the cellos, and playing in a clef written just for her. The viola is often misunderstood and mistaken for a “larger violin” or sometimes either forgotten about or made the butt of jokes. ...