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Fifty-three years ago this month, the curtain went up on Fancy Free, the first ballet by a twenty-five-year-old dancer from New York named Jerome Robbins. There had never been anything [...]

Franz Schubert was born 200 years ago this past January, and the anniversary was marked by countless public performances and new recordings of his music. But among all the observances [...]

When Bill Clinton and Al Gore gave their victory speeches in Little Rock last November, the music used to introduce them was Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, a piece, one TV [...]

Film composers, long treated as second-class figures by the musical establishment, have lately come into their own. Schwann Opus, the quarterly catalogue of recorded classical music, recently featured two of [...]

'Writing shortly after Duke Ellington's death in 1974, the jazz scholar Gunther Schuller placed the composer of 'It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)' in 'the [...]

DANCE IN America is in a slump. At century's end, with the major choreographers of the modern era either dead (George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Antony Tudor) or nearing the close [...]

There was a time when a New York debut could be the most important moment in a musician's life. Leonard Bernstein, Jascha Heifetz, Kirsten Flagstad, Yehudi Menuhin, and any number [...]

'What one reads in the newspaper,' said Bismarck, 'can also be true.' I thought of that wry remark as I looked at the obituaries for the cabaret singer Nancy Lamott [...]

SAMUEL BARBER (1910-81) was the most successful of the American composers who came to prominence between the world wars. At a time when American music was regarded as box-office poison, [...]

Robert Schumann's 1840 song cycle, Frauenliehe und Lehen, is a first-person account of the courtship, marriage, and widowhood of a young woman (the text was written by a man, the [...]

H. L. MENCKEN ON AMERICAN LITERATURE. Edited by S. T. Joshi. Ohio Univ. Press. 298 pp. $44.95 Nowadays most people think of H. L. Mencken (1880--1956) as the scourge of [...]

Arthur Rubinstein was born in 1887 and died in 1982, six years after making his last recordings for RCA and giving his farewell concert at London's Wigmore Hall. He played [...]

IF A music lover of 1966 were to I awake one morning and find himself transported, Rip Van Winkle-like, to the classical department of a present-day record store, what would [...]

OPERA BUFFS have conducted a spirited debate over the merits of the Metropolitan Opera's new 'Met Titles' system, introduced in October, in which line-by-line English translations of libretti are flashed [...]

GRP Records, which owns the catalogue of Decca, a prominent record label of the 30's and 40's, recently released a two-CD set of jazz performances originally recorded by the older [...]

The entry for Philip Glass in the sixth edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published in 1980, is 24 lines long. The entry in The New [...]

The critic Paul Elmer More once described John Dos Passos's novel Manhattan Transfer as 'an explosion in a cesspool.' Much the same thing could be said of 'Discussing the Undiscussable,' [...]

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) is now generally regarded as one of the great composers of our time, but his reputation, at least in the West, was not always so high. Thereby [...]

YOUNGER readers accustomed to hearing the name of the late Leonard Bernstein uttered only in reverential tones may find it hard to believe that America's best-known classical musician was for [...]

WHAT REALLY happened to classical music in the 20th century? The survey histories of modern music that were published in the 1960's mostly took for granted the historical inevitability and [...]

DO THE lyrics of popular songs qualify as poetry? In 2000, the Library of America published American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, a two-volume anthology in which Cole Porter's 'I Get [...]

WHY IS it that some musicians become famous and others are merely admired, even though they may be similarly gifted? Carl Flesch, a distinguished violin teacher who also had a [...]

THE FACT that Adolf Hitler aspired as a young man to be an artist is sufficiently well known to have passed into the common stock of allusion. ('Hitler--there was a [...]