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WHAT MAKES a composer great? The quality of his music is the obvious answer--and the right one. But few listeners (and surprisingly few critics) are self-confident enough to vouch for [...]

IN THOMAS Harris's best-selling 1988 horror novel The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist turned serial killer, tells his captors that he is willing to help them track [...]

ALL ART is in some sense autobiographical, if only because it is self-expressive--a fact that many artists are understandably reluctant to admit. Jazz musicians, however, are more forthright than others [...]

LAST YEAR, for the first time, blank compact discs outsold pre-recorded ones. This statistic has been widely reported in the news media, usually in connection with the fact that sales [...]

ARTURO TOSCANINI was the most admired of 20th-century conductors--and, in certain circles, the most reviled. Throughout the first half of his seven-decade-long career, Toscanini was spoken and written of in [...]

IN 1927, the British music-hall duo Flotsam & Jetsam recorded a comic song, 'What Was the Matter with Rachmaninov?,' in which they lamented the popularity of the once-ubiquitous Prelude in [...]

'LET ME make the songs of a nation,' the Scottish statesman Andrew Fletcher declared in 1703, 'and I care not who makes its laws.' This oft-quoted remark applies with particular [...]

'STRANGE HOW potent cheap O music is,' Noel Coward wrote in Private Lives. That droll tribute to the power of popular song has been quoted countless times--but Coward, himself a [...]

FEW REPUTATIONS in classical music have fluctuated so widely as that of the German composer Paul Hindemith. From the mid1920's on, he was acknowledged both as one of the key [...]

FAR MORE people have heard the music of Miklos Rozsa than that of his countryman and fellow modernist Bela Bartok, but far fewer know his name. For more than four [...]

HOW DID artists and entertainers respond to the destruction of the World Trade Center? One early response came from the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a founding figure of the postwar [...]

THE TRUMPETER Louis Armstrong was universally recognized in his own lifetime as the key figure in the history of jazz. Though his reputation with the general pubfic went into a […]

THE BEATLES released Let It Be, the last of their thirteen albums, 36 years ago. (l) Today there is no one musical group or soloist capable of commanding the attention […]

One hundred years after his birth, George Gershwin is the most widely remembered of the songwriters who dominated American popular music between the end of World War I and the [...]

In 1961, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould canceled a scheduled appearance with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, claiming that he had developed a phobic reaction--in his words, 'something approaching [...]

Sixty years ago this January, Benny Goodman and his band appeared at New York's Carnegie Hall--the first time a full evening of jazz had been presented at the most celebrated [...]

For Decades, Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) and Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), the best-known French composers of the period between the two world wars, occupied the same pigeonhole: they both produced music that [...]

No jazz pianist of the postwar era is more widely admired than Bill Evans (1929-80). The cover of Everybody Digs Bill Evans, the 1958 album that first brought him to [...]

A CHAPTER in the history of American classical music is quietly drawing to a close, and--though unknown to most music lovers--another has already opened. For the past fifteen years, a [...]

Hector Berlioz is famous, but not popular. He is, in fact, the only great composer of the 19th century never to have been popular. To be sure, his best-known composition, [...]

What will Frank Sinatra be remembered for? In the decade prior to his retirement in 1995, his singing became a grotesque and embarrassing self-caricature. His oft-reported ties to organized crime [...]

Virgil Thomson is among the most famous American composers of the 20th century, but not for his compositions. 'We all loved his music,' Leonard Bernstein tactlessly but accurately said after [...]

David Helfgott, a middle-aged, mentally-ill pianist from Australia, was all but unknown outside his native land a year ago; today, he is one of the hottest tickets in classical music. [...]

In 1965, Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance of Charles Ives's Fourth Symphony at Camegie Hall. At the time, Ives, who had died eleven years [...]