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Les Six
“Collet chose six names absolutely arbitrarily, those of Auric, Durey, Honegger, Poulenc, Tailleferre and me, simply because we knew each other and we were pals and appeared on the same musical...
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The Madrigal
The scintillating court life of the late Italian Renaissance, as portrayed by Baldassare Castiglione and Niccolò Machiavelli, provides the cultural backdrop for the madrigal. Even as the dukes and...
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Program Music and the Romantic Tone Poem
The Greeks had a word for it: ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗ (mousike), which not only meant the discipline of music, but also encompassed poetry, dance, and elementary education. The ancients believed that reaching the...
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The Classical Era
Defined as a time period in the history of western music, the Classical era begins about 1735 and ends around 1825, overlapping a little with the surrounding periods of late Baroque and early Romantic...
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What We Liked in 2011
Each fall, AllMusic’s intrepid editors and writers present their picks for the best classical albums, out of the hundreds of CDs they’ve reviewed over the year, and their lists are as varied as...
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Classical Necrology 2011
In past years, AllMusic’s classical editors have seen disconcertingly long lists of obituaries, which included the names of many musical legends. A smaller but no less important group of musicians...
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Musique Concrète: Its Place in the History of Electronic Music
Musique concrète is a type of electroacoustic music in which acoustic sounds are used as source material. It was the brainchild of Parisian radio engineer Pierre Schaeffer (left) in the years following...
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The Concerto Grosso
Widespread use of the term concerto appeared in the Baroque period, and by the 1670s, it came to mean an orchestral work with a solo part or multiple parts. The concerto grosso (pl. concerti grossi) is...
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It Ain’t Your Grandpa’s Harpsichord
The development of the modern piano was unique in music history. For the sake of comparison, the basic dimensions, materials, principles of construction, and manufacturing techniques of string...
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A Little Room for Some Chamber Music
The term chamber music is usually applied to concert pieces performed by one to nine instrumentalists, as distinguished from orchestral or band music, which is played by considerably larger groups, or...
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