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GRAHAM'S MUSIC

Classical Music Demystified

I'm Graham Abbott, an Australian conductor and music educator. This blog was devised as a sanity-saving project in 2020 when lockdowns meant that I lost a year's work almost overnight. Here I write about classical music and share its inside stories. Most of these stories will be based on scripts which I wrote and presented on "Keys To Music" on ABC Classic between 2003 and 2017. Many thanks to the ABC for permission to use this material.

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A long-overdue update

It's nearly three years since I added an article to this blog and yet it continues to get so many hits and garner so many new members. I...

"We teach music because it is unique and good."

Over the weekend of 1-3 April, 2022 I had the privilege of being involved in the inaugural Richard Gill Memorial Festival of Strings in...

Malcolm Williamson: Unfinished Business

This music comes from an opera which premiered in London in July 1963. It was written by an Australian and it garnered enormously...

Études are more than Studies

Names and labels can be a problem in music. As Juliet says to Romeo: What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would...

The Composer's Muse

The idea of "inspiration" is one we use a lot in music. Without thinking much about it, we often say a piece or a composer was inspired...

Crowd Scenes

This blog has been focusing on opera in recent posts, looking at aspects of musical storytelling which opera does particularly well. So...

Love Scenes

This post is the third in a series of four in which I'm looking at opera from a slightly different perspective, focusing on the sorts of...

Death Scenes

In 1987, Peter Conrad, an Australian-born academic now based in the UK, published a book called A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of...

Mad Scenes

In 2015 I presented a series of four Keys to Music programs under the general heading of Focus on Opera. These looked in turn at mad...

The Life and Work of Igor Stravinsky

It's always fascinating to hear music by famous composers before they became famous and this music is a perfect example. At first...

Bach's Other Masses

If I said the words "Bach" and "Mass" in the same sentence, I think most music lovers would assume I was referring to Johann Sebastian...

Big Chamber Music: for nine, ten and more

In my last post I started by mentioning Australia's obsession with "big things" as tourist attractions. The idea that something big - in...

Big Chamber Music: for six, seven and eight

Australia is a big country and we seem to be obsessed with big things. Locations around the nation aim to attract visitors with their own...

Purcell's Contemporaries

This music [listen] is by one of the best-known of all English composers, Henry Purcell. It's unthinkable to consider English music of...

Schubert's Last Year

This music [listen] is the final song in Winterreise - Winter Journey - a song cycle composed by Franz Schubert in 1827. Winterreise is...

Who's *still* afraid of Schoenberg?

One of the earliest Keys To Music programs (number 22, in fact, which went to air in June, 2003) was called "Who's Afraid of...

The Life and Work of Lassus

A while back I came to the realisation that I often forget Bartók. I was brought up to think of the history of 20th century music as...

The Life and Work of Joseph Haydn

Part One: 1732-1766 At the eastern end of modern-day Austria, very close to the border with Slovakia, is the village of Rohrau. 45 km...

Mozart's Last Year

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is so central to western musical culture that it's easy to forget how important he is and how unique he was. Like...

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