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MONDAY, Aug. 17 (HealthDay News) -- It's one of the enduring mysteries of classical music: What -- or who -- killed Mozart at the age of 35 when he was at the height of his creative powers? Now, there's a new theory: He died of complications of strep throat. The latest hypothesis lacks the inherent drama of murder by a rival or suicide, which have both been suggested as causes of Mozart's death. But Andrew Steptoe, co-author of a historical diagnosis published Aug. 18 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, said an infection makes the most sense, considering medical records...

Joseph Haydn was born on March 31st, 1732 in the village of Rohrau in Lower Austria, a province of the Habsburg empire. This was arguably the most multinational, multicultural, multilingual and generally diverse great power that Europe had ever seen. Its then ruler, Charles VI, held sway over a great conglomeration of territories stretching from Ostend to Belgrade and from Prague to Palermo. It included all or part of the following present-day countries: Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. As Sir Harold Temperley observed, the Habsburg monarchy was not...

 Here are some links to go to if you would like to download some wonderful music for Easter: Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music - The Musical Offering in MP3The download links at the page above look like this: Introitus: Resurrexi (Graduale Romanum)Hover your mouse cursor over the underlined / italicized text and right-click, then select 'save target as' from the right-click menu and choose your preferred download location. Hymns for the Celebrations of the Liturgical Year, Pontifical Musical Chorus of the Sistine ChapelThe download links at this page are different, they look like this: IO SONO RISORTO  For these...

      Here are two links at the Vatican's website that you can go to for downloading free music for Christmas as well as other occasions.  Hymns for the Celebrations of the Liturgical Year, Pontifical Musical Chorus of the Sistine ChapelOn this page, the links to the MP3 files look like this    It will probably be easiest to hover your mouse cursor over the note picture, right-click your mouse and select "save target as" to define where you want the file saved.When the file is finished downloading it will be available to be played on your computer's MP3 player. ...

It is Sunday and I am in the mood to probe the interest at FR for one of America's all time greatest artists and more specifically, classical composers: Charles Ives. I learned about him via composer, lyricist, and Brian Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks (also a true American original). And my love has, since it began in 1990 or thereabouts, never diminished). I have all of his recorded works and would not want to single out one masterpiece, they're all great, with the possible exception of the First Symphony (mainly because there's still too much Schumann and Brahms in there,...

The "Musicians Who Turn 50", "Musicians Who Turn 60", "Favorite Drummer" and "Favorite Guitarist" were such hit threads on FR, I've decided to do this one. Who is your favorite SONGWRITING DUO? We all know that Lennon-McCartney were amazing together and possibly the best songwriting duo ever. They might be mentioned several times on this thread. If you choose John & Paul, be specific about which song and lyric(s).

An exceptional essay well worth reading. A few excerpts are: "...What the university offered, then, became no different from the fare of a television station, a local movie theater, rap concert, or a government bureaucracy: the more the campus devolved into popular life, the less it had to offer anything of rarity or singular beauty—confirming Plato’s pessimism that the radical egalitarian appeal to mass appetites must lead to arts of a lesser and more accessible quality. If half-educated strippers and sex entertainers are deemed street artists or populist philosophers, then they can now be welcomed to campus, exempt from both...

Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise tells the story of what happened to Western classical music in the twentieth century. We all know that the invention of recorded sound around 1900 made possible an extraordinary dissemination of the riches of the classical repertoire – largely composed for the rich and powerful – to the mass of ordinary people. On the gramophone, the radio, television and, subliminally and hence more powerfully, through the movies, the classical sound in all its variants (even the supposedly rebarbative confections of the Second Viennese School) has insinuated itself into the culture at large. Never before...

William Wolcott's violin studio is about the size of a large broom closet, yet it's often the site of amazing master classes. Virtuoso Itzhak Perlman has held court there. Pinchas Zukerman, Sarah Chang and other fabulous fiddlers also have squeezed into the room. They all fit because of a miraculous little invention: the Internet. "There's an incredible amount of classical music now on the Internet, and it's really helping me teach my students," said Wolcott, an instructor at the Omaha Conservatory of Music. "We can sign on to YouTube right here in my studio and watch the world's greatest violinists...

I received a 30% off coupon for Borders that can be used today or tomorrow, and I've decided to get a CD of Chopin's polonaises, since I currently don't have anything with those pieces on it.

Summer issue of Sacred Music By CMAA on May 21, 2007 at 3:34 pm Here is the contents of the Summer 2007 issue of Sacred Music. You can join the CMAA and receive this issue and three more for $30. EDITORIALS Et Erit In Pace Memoria Ejus † Richard J. Schuler | Robert Skeris On the Apostolic Exhortation | William Mahrt ARTICLES The Life and Meaning of the Sequence | By Lázló Dobszay Ornamented Chant in Spain | Lorenzo CandelariaREPERTORY The Alternatim Alternative | Susan Treacy Psallat Ecclesia | Sequence for the Dedication of a Church ARCHIVE The Young...

Ipod generation boosts classical music radio station by 500,000 listenersby PAUL REVOIR - More by this author » Last updated at 22:13pm on 10th May 2007  Generation iPod: Young listeners have boosted the audience of classical radio station Classic FM by 500,000 Britain's iPod generation is becoming hooked on classical music with new figures revealing a huge surge in youngsters listening to radio station Classic FM. Driven by the success of film scores for blockbuster movies like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and determined efforts to sex-up the classical music industry, a section of Britain's youth appears...

Easter 2006 Easter 2005 Easter 2004 Easter 2003 Easter 2002     Easter 2001 Easter 2000          Easter Music    Holy Week 2006 Holy Week 2005 Holy Week 2004 Holy Week 2003 Holy Week 2002  EASTER MUSIC: Pontifical Musical Chorus of the Sistine Chapel Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music

Pope wants comeback for Gregorian chants By Philip PullellaVATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, who last week told the world he does not care much for Bob Dylan, said on Tuesday he would like Gregorian chant to make a comeback. The 79-year-old German Pope said the Catholic faithful should learn more of the chanting traditionally sung in Latin by choirs of monks since the Middle Ages."The better-known prayers of the Church's tradition should be recited in Latin and, if possible, selections of Gregorian chant should be sung," he said in part of a 140-page booklet on the Mass.He lamented...

Great move by Saul Levine as KMZT becomes KKGO-FM (Go Country 105) on Monday. This is one of the best decisions in a long time for the marketplace. Good for him and best of success. Classical will still be served on 91.5, 1260, and KMZT HD.

Washington radio station WGMS dropped the music of Mozart and Tchaikovsky yesterday after nearly six decades and replaced its classical format with tunes by Cheap Trick, Elton John and the Bee Gees in a two-part shake-up. Last night, WETA dropped its news and talk programming and became a classical station again in a coordinated move with Bonneville International Corp., which owns WGMS (103.9 and 104.1 FM). WETA (90.9 FM) was a classical station for 35 years until dropping the format in February 2005. snip But Bonneville is entering a highly competitive segment of the radio market. Its new station replacing...

In recent years, Hamilton College has done little that would have pleased its namesake. It's hard to imagine that any of the founding generation's leaders—perhaps excepting Paine—could find much to their liking in the college's fawning treatment of radical icons or its fervent multiculturalism. It was Hamilton that sought to bring former weather underground member and convicted terrorist, Susan Rosenberg, to campus as an instructor and "artist-in-residence", as it was Hamilton that launched Ward Churchill into world class notoriety by inviting him to speak. But it's good to discover that Hamilton is capable of learning something from its repeated embarrassments....

Station likely to get new home on the dial If all goes as planned, local classical music fans will be able to keep listening to their favorite radio programming on WCRB-FM. But instead of tuning into 102.5 as they now do, they'll turn to another frequency on the FM dial, 99.5. The current WCRB-FM is being sold to Greater Media, which owns 19 radio stations, including five in Boston. Much speculation has surrounded the station's fate -- and its classical format. But it appears the format will live on, if on a station that's more difficult to hear in the...

EVERYONE has heard the requiems sung for classical music or at least the reports of its failing health: that its audience is graying, record sales have shriveled and the cost of live performance is rising as ticket sales decline. Music education has virtually disappeared from public schools. Classical programming has (all but) disappeared from television and radio. And 17 orchestras have closed in the last 20 years. All this has of late become the subject of countless blogs, news reports, books and symposiums, with classical music partisans furrowing their brows and debating what went wrong, what can still go wrong...

An ethnomusicologist considers the Sawkins v. Hyperion case. With the Sawkins v. Hyperion case, the classical music world has discovered a fact about copyright law that has long bothered folklorists and ethnomusicologists: under certain circumstances, the law allows individuals, in effect, to "privatize" works that are common property. Anonymous works handed down via oral tradition — the sort that make up the musical heritage of many small-scale societies — have always been vulnerable to legal appropriation. For a recent (and relatively benign) example, consider the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek's "Pygmy Lullaby" (from the 1996 recording "Visible World"). The title notwithstanding,...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A small part of a newly identified choral work by baroque Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi was played for the first time in about 250 years on Tuesday after being uncovered by an Australian academic. Janice Stockigt of the University of Melbourne said the 11-movement "Dixit Dominus" for choir and soloists, which she uncovered in Dresden this year, would be played in full in the German city next year. Stockigt said the work had previously been attributed to Baldassarre Galuppi, a Venetian contemporary of Vivaldi, since it first appeared in Galuppi's name in Dresden's Catholic Court Church in...

Beethoven was a narcissistic hooligan The composer was certainly a genius, but he diverted music from elegant universality into tortured self-obsessionDylan Evans Tuesday June 7, 2005 Guardian It's Beethoven week on the BBC. By midnight on Friday Radio 3 will have filled six days of airtime with every single note the composer wrote - every symphony, every quartet, every sonata and lots more besides. This coincides with a series of three films on BBC2 in which the conductor Charles Hazlewood tells us about the composer's life, and three programmes of musical analysis on BBC4. It's good to see classical music...

Like Rodney Dangerfield, the humanities in Washington "don't get no respect." Not as much as they should, anyway. We're a company town and the company makes politics. But like a blind squirrel who finds an acorn once in a while, politicians and the journalists gather occasionally with others who crave more profundity than the noise in political rhetoric to listen to the annual >Jefferson Lecture. "The training of the intellect was meant to produce an intrinsic pleasure and satisfaction but it also had practical goals of importance to the individual and the entire community, to make the humanistically trained individuals...

American political conservatives enjoy an uneasy relationship with high culture. There are, of course, those who define their conservatism precisely in terms of high culture - of the preservation and transmission from past to future generations of "the best that has been thought and written." But economic and religious conservatives might wonder what's in it for them. For it is far from obvious that the canonical works of literature, music and visual art are much help, on the whole, when it comes to defending the free market or the altar and hearth. It would be one thing if the canon...

The Old Master By James Bartel With his first wife Maria Barbara, his soulmate as history tells us, Sebastian Bach fathered seven children. The first child was a daughter, Catharina. A pair of twins died within days. The final son died within a year. Months later, Maria Barbara succumbed to disease. Bach was then 35 and engaged in the full awakening of his genius. His workload was Herculean and mounting, and now there were five children at home without a mother, the oldest being 12. Staggered by grief, Bach shouldered on. Hear the Old Master speak: "I was obliged to...

Imagine Plato, a noted fan of ancient Greek athletics, providing color commentary for the upcoming Olympic Games: "Why in Zeus' name are they wearing clothes?" he might ask. The Olympics are returning to their original home in Greece next month but not to their original dress code. "This may be the most obvious and striking difference between today's athletes and the ancient Greeks," UC Berkeley archaeologist Stephen Miller says in "Ancient Greek Athletics," his new book on the ancient games. So embedded was competing in the nude that our word gymnasium comes from the Greek gymnos for "naked," Miller notes...

I've had to open the Oval Office doors more frequently for a bad performance on television than for somebody whose temper flared enough to cause for such summons, since the doors to the Oval Office, and the term itself, debuted February 22 at Rockingham, NC. (And Francis Ferko should . . . I can't say it. He homewrecked two cities and a whole state to please himself.) But now the Oval Office doors are opening wide again for a looney show on the WB called "Superstar USA". "Auditions for The WB's Superstar USA were held in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Orlando...

How do you write the "political history" of a piece of music? The idea isn't as farfetched as you might think. Music professor Esteban Buch did just that in his book BEETHOVEN'S NINTH: A POLITICAL HISTORY. And it's an intriguing, thought-provoking history. Beethoven's magnificent setting of the ODE TO JOY (the tune to the hymn, "Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee") appeals to people everywhere -- and it seems to mean something different to each one. One could argue that people love the symphony simply because of the lyrics that celebrate universal brotherhood, the beauty and emotion of the music, and...

If music is the universal language, then the message emanating from a Steinway concert grand piano at a concert today in Baghdad, Iraq, was one of friendship and support. The Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra performed its first concert today at the Baghdad Convention Center since its new grand piano arrived last month. Steinway & Sons offered to donate the piano after the orchestra performed here with the Washington National Symphony Orchestra. Steinway responded to a National Endowment for the Arts plea for companies to donate instruments to the Iraqi orchestra, which floundered under Saddam Hussein. Once the donation was made,...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Forget the movie, Cecilia Bartoli says. Antonio Salieri isn't the bad guy who poisoned Mozart. He's an underappreciated genius who paved the path for Beethoven. Following hit recordings of works by Vivaldi and Gluck, Bartoli is touring the United States to support her latest project, "The Salieri Album," which contains 13 arias from the seldom-heard composer. Some of the pieces were so obscure that they had to be found in a Vienna library -- only two of the arias had ever been recorded.

You may wish to jot this in your diaries and upbraid me with it in twelve months' time but I am about to make the rock-solid prediction that the year 2004 will be the last for the classical record industry. The unravelling has run faster than prestissimo. Major labels which, a decade ago, pumped out 120 new releases a year are now reduced to a trickle of two dozen. Epochal concerts are no longer recorded for posterity. Classical stars have lost their license to twinkle. Where labels once fought bidding wars over shimmering talent they now compete in shedding it....

If I am to believe the media, President George W. Bush’s policies have engineered a complete economic meltdown and put us in the worst fiscal condition since the great depression. When I hear this I typically ignore it. As an economics major, I know how to read through nonsense. Recently, however, it has come to my attention that many economists themselves have entered into this silliness. Recently, the think tank EPI circled a petition opposing the Bush tax cut that was signed by over 500 economists, including several Nobel laureates. What struck me as odd was not that some of...

What are your most perfect albums? By perfect albums, I mean albums where you don't have to skip over a weak track. Collections and Best of packages do not count. Some of mine: (in no particular order) 1. The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds 2. The Beatles - Revolver 3. Miles Davis - On the Corner 4. The Clash - London Calling 5. Willie Dixon - I Am the Blues 6. Johnny Cash - At Folsom Prison 7. Black Flag - Damaged 8. John Coltrane - Love Supreme 9. The Who - The Who Sell Out 10. Duke Ellington &...

A bus station in America is planning to play classical music and smooth jazz to discourage loitering teenagers. Officials at the Trade Street in Charlotte, North Carolina, hope the "grow-up" music will irritate groups of youths who hang around the station. The station's loudspeakers already emit the calls of hawks and owls to frighten away pigeons that roost in the rafters. "The idea is to make the atmosphere at the Trade Street station less pleasant for those who aren't there to catch a bus," a spokeswoman told the Charlotte Observer. "We know if we play a certain genre, people won't...

Michael Jackson says he doesn't like pop and would much rather listen to classical music. He was asked why he had bought two classical rather than pop CDs whilst out shopping in Berlin last week. Jackson, the self-styled King of Pop, told German magazine Bunte: "I don't like pop music." The singer, whose album Thriller remains the world's biggest-seller, was in Berlin to receive the Millennium Bambi award in recognition of his status as the world's "greatest living pop icon". Jackson, who went shopping for the CDs without his usual bodyguards, said: "I'd like to go shopping for CDs in...

Progressive Dispensationalism Some Observations -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Its Leaders 1) Craig Blaising, a former Dallas Seminary Professor who is now teaching at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY (a Southern Baptist school which is non-dispensational); 2) Darrell Bock, professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Seminary; 3) Robert Saucy, who taught at Talbot School of Theology (Talbot Seminary). Due to the pioneering work of these men and others, many others have entered the progressive fold. 2. Its Books 1) Dispensationalism, Israel and the Church by Blaising and Bock (1992); 2) The Case for Progressive Dispensationalism by Saucy (1993); 3) Progressive Dispensationalism...