A Minute with Miles
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A Minute with Miles
Illuminating 60-second flights through the world of classical music with host and longtime NPR commentator Miles Hoffman. Produced by South Carolina Public Radio.You can enjoy an archive of these segments here.
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Joanna Mauer: wisdom vs. age
One of the wonderful aspects of life as a musician: age differences among players don’t mean anything. What counts is what kind of person you are, and...
IPA
Professional opera singers often have to sing in languages with which they’re completely unfamiliar. And yet they’re expected to pronounce all the wor...
Interpretations vs. the music itself
Like it or not, performers can’t help evaluating performance, especially in the cases of pieces we know or instruments we play.
Text-based music
It’s often easier to say what classical music is not, than to say what it is.
Brass quintet
Most of what brass players do is done with the lips, and it’s invisible to us.
Bad chairs
Chairs that are too low, too high, too hard, too slippery, or with seats tilted backward… they’re the bane of musicians’ existence.
Why should somebody else...
Why should somebody else—anybody else, whether it’s a program annotator or a radio announcer—tell me that a piece of music is “sad,” or happy, or ligh...
The bad old days
In the bad old days of symphony orchestras in this country, music directors were absolute dictators, and orchestra musicians had few protections. If a...
Taste vs. judgement
Do you agree with the judgment that the two greatest composers of the late Baroque were Bach and Handel? Well, that means, unavoidably, that the rest...
Philippe Gaubert
He may not be well know to the general public today, but, yet Philippe Gaubert was one of the most famous and important French musicians of the first...
Old tools, old instruments
I don’t suppose you have a pair of four-hundred-year-old pliers in your kitchen tool drawer, or a screwdriver made in the 1700s? No, probably not. Too...
Old 78s
Have you by any chance been hanging on to your grandparents’ old 78 rpm records? Carting them around, perhaps, and storing them on shelves or in boxes...
Malaria and music
The riches that music has to offer, whether in times of great sorrow or great joy, are both incalculable and irreplaceable.
Live orchestras
I play concerts for a living, so you wouldn’t think I’d need reminding of the dramatic difference between listening to a recording and hearing a live...
Great artists, lousy people
There are many great creative artists, including great composers, who have been mediocre human beings, not to mention any number who have been downrig...
Frets
The guitar, the lute, and the viola da gamba all have frets. Have you ever wondered why?
Empathy - Music Reflecting Your Mood
Have you ever wondered why, when we’re feeling sad, or lonely, or downright miserable, we usually prefer to listen to music that somehow reflects our...
Brass Magic
For those of us who don’t play a brass instrument, watching brass players play always seems a bit like watching a magic show. We hear the French horni...
Verdi: Genius and Passion
Why have Verdi's operas stood the test of time, while those of his contemporaries have not?
Mozart: What the Letters Show
If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus, or the play it was based on, you may have gotten the impression that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was some sort of giggli...