Music History Monday

On the evening of October 22, 1764, Leclair went out to meet some friends. On returning home he was attacked from behind and stabbed three times. He fell directly in front of his door and that was where he was found on the morning of October 23rd, dead and lying in a pool of his own blood. […]

In 1946, at the age of sixteen, he decided to “become a composer.” Ah: if ignorance is bliss then Takemitsu must have been most blissful, because when it came to music, his ignorance was almost complete. But that didn’t stop him… […]

October 2 was a most interesting day in music history. Rather than choose just one person or event for discussion, we’re going to spread the love today and observe three people and one event for whom/which October 2 was a signal date. […]

Glenn Gould was an otherworldly musical genius. He was also a nut: one of the great eccentrics in the history of Western music. He wasn’t a nut because he was a musical genius, and he wasn’t a musical genius because he was a nut. No; the genius and the nuttiness were one and the same, something that separated him – almost from the beginning of his life and increasingly as he got older – from his fellow human beings. […]

The composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov is recognized as the godfather of Azerbaijani concert music and his birthday, September 18, is National Azerbaijan Music Day. […]

I’ve chosen, today, not to celebrate but rather, to observe some particular deaths: stupid deaths, unnecessary and premature deaths. A grim topic but not an uninteresting one, given that death is one of the very few things each of us will eventually have in common. […]

Bruckner was a total country bumpkin: naïve, simple, overly trusting, deferential and pious to a fault….Bruckner’s “Jethro Clampett” persona was a source of great humor among the sophisticates of Vienna. But in fact he was an odd man, even for a composer. […]

300 years ago George Frederich Handel’s Orchestral Suites in F Major and D Major (collectively known as his Water Music) received their premiere during a royal cruise down the River Thames from Whitehall to Chelsea. Here’s the story—the great story—about the writing and the premiere of that work. […]