It's perhaps a telling aspect of musical etymology that the words opera and ballet have very different origins. Opera is an Italian word,...

Posthumous fame is a fickle thing. So is fame in your own lifetime, I guess. There are many figures in the arts who were not appreciated...

"Power" is a word much used, and possibly abused, in the English language. In music, what seems to be powerful to some people can be a...

I imagine any of you who are movie and TV buffs would know what Bette Davis, Glenda Jackson, Judi Dench, Quentin Crisp, Helen Mirren and...

This is the second instalment in an occasional series I’m calling "Australian Heritage". In these we're looking at Australian composers...

In the last few years of his life, Franz Schubert - probably the greatest composer of art song in western music - composed two...

It's common for people to look at European art music in the early 20th century as being divided into two major streams: those who...

I have to confess up front that this post is a complete indulgence for me, one of those surveys in which I want to share with you some...

Early in the 19th century, Franz Schubert visited a famous musician's grave in Salzburg. With tears in his eyes he is reported to have...

There are two words which are guaranteed to arouse a voyeuristic, if not morbid, curiosity in most people. These words - murder and...

Foremost among the musical minds active in Italy around 1600 was Claudio Monteverdi. Born in Cremona in May 1567, Monteverdi took up a...

It's an enormous understatement to say that the 17th century was one of the most turbulent times in English history. The reign of...

I was a tertiary student in the late 1970s. "New music" in those days was, virtually by definition, atonal. To write conventional chords...

Music is an artform which doesn't easily fit into pigeon holes. This doesn't stop us trying, though, and it has to be admitted that our...

In the general western mindset, "Easter" is a term which takes in the long weekend spanning Good Friday to Easter Monday, and maybe even...

It's the night of 15 January 1941, and at Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz in Silesia, a group of a few hundred prisoners...

In 1903, a plaque containing a poem by Emma Lazarus was attached to the inside of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York....

Anton Bruckner is a composer who tends to divide people. His life covered most of the 19th century (he lived from 1824 to 1896) and...

The German composer Paul Hindemith was born in 1895, which means that in 1919, when the Weimar Republic replaced the German monarchy...

When I was at the end of what is now called Year 10 I attended my first music camp, run by the NSW Department of Education Music Branch....