Mini Episodes Episodes

There’s a string quartet written by the American composer Morton Feldman in the 1980s that is about 6 hours long. ‘Einstein on the Beach’, the opera by Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson, is about five hours long and is performed without an...

Maybe the place to start... An eight-minute overview of the podcast including some unfairly brief excerpts from music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Dmitri Shostakovich, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Adams, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Gershwin and Ross...

If you're exploring classical music, you'll bump into the term 'sonata' everywhere - piano sonatas, violin sonatas, trio sonatas… even sonata-form. This mini-episode untangles the many meanings of this surprisingly variable w...

Spend any time with musicians who play in an orchestra it won’t be long before they are sharing war stories of their experiences with dreadful conductors. The subtext of some of these conversations is a half-serious belief that the conductor is just...

Sonata, cantata, concerto, adagio... for English speakers approaching classical music, these Italian terms can feel like an unnecessary barrier. This mini-episode explores how Italian became classical music's universal language… its journey from the...