We all know that music is beneficial to the human mind: it lowers anxiety, pain levels, it alters your brainwaves and, of course, helps infants’ brain development. The virtues of music have been known ...

Within his historical context, the music of Wilhelm Richard Wagner represented elemental chaos. Outside of his historical context, it reminds us more of order gone horribly wrong. It is not entirely ...

Classical music covers a very broad span of music from the Medieval to the present day. Each era of music has its unique characteristics and idiosyncrasies. To find your way towards a richer ...

The commonly recognised ‘periods’ of Western Classical Music I have covered in a previous article. This piece centres on the different types of Classical music within that broad time frame. Below, I ...

Beethoven composed quite extensively for the violin and piano completing ten Sonatas in his lifetime. This Sonata is the ninth of the set and probably one of the most played and the most notoriously ...

A dulcimer is a stringed folk instrument which basically comes in two different varieties: the hammered dulcimer – which has strings stretched over a sounding board with a trapezoidal shape, generally ...

Post-pandemic, the opportunity to enjoy live music and music festivals at home, abroad or further afield is again possible. The plethora of options is almost bewildering but a luxury well worth ...

Music is littered with vocabulary. Dictionaries of music list the numerous terms that you have the option to embed into your language if you wish. Many of these terms are Italian as that wonderful ...

When we think of an orchestra, we immediately think of a large number of violinists sitting in front of the stage, in an almost privileged place near the conductor, just like the cellos and violas.

When the world of the moving picture arrived in the early part of the 20th century, it was a revolution. What is often referred to as the silent years from around 1910 to 1927 marked a turning point ...

The tambourine is probably one of the easiest and most fun musical instruments to play anywhere in the world. If you have any rhythm at all, and sometimes even if you don’t, you, too, can play a ...

Musical tradition is at times a rather odd element of this popular art. One of those traditions that still holds true for today is that of using Italian terms to instruct a performer in notated scores ...