Cole Porter's real secret was not the gay life a new film biography will highlight. It was how he made his songs
John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls finds redemption in September 11, and should bring contemporary classical music to a new audience
Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! and Carousel, a model comedy and a model tragedy, created a new theatrical genre
In the intense quiet of a Maine camp aspiring conductors work on bossiness, passivity, and how to move to the music
More a classicist than an avant-gardist, Philip Glass embraces rock music without imitating it
The NPR 100 shows for better or worse what Americans think is their classical music
Kurt Weill did not, as most critics would have it, sell out to Broadway after his early Berlin brilliance
In political life as in his music, Aaron Copland decorously hid his emotions
What makes opera magical in the age of movies?
The composer mixed popular and classical idioms like no one before or since, and performers are still baffled
Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress is purposely hard to love -- which is why it so amply rewards those who stay for the glorious third act.
This year's Charles Ives is another illustration of how protean our most American composer remains.
In creating himself according to the nation's enthusiasm for his songs, Irving Berlin helped to create a national identity
How does one account for the fall of Pierre Boulez the composer and the rise of Pierre Boulez the conductor?
Like Igor Stravinsky, Duke Ellington was a brilliant assembler of other people’s music
A brilliant talent dissipated in exhibitionistic self-indulgence? The standard critical view of Leonard Bernstein must be revised or reversed, a composer finds on listening afresh to Bernstein's work as a conductor, as a composer, and—especially—as a teacher