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Music

An Orchestra of One: Richard Johnson's Winslaphones

Sometimes a conventional instrument just won't do. So composer Richard Johnson built his own - the winslaphones. Made from parts of a trumpet, trombone, euphonium, and a host of other instruments, the winslaphones produces an incredible array of sounds and tones.

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100 Years of the Maple Leaf Rag

The explosive popularity of the Maple Leaf Rag, like so many other seminal events in American history, was founded on fortuitous chance. The club that inspired the song functioned for only a year and a half. Scott Joplin, the composer, spent only a few years of his life in Sedalia before he moved on to St. Louis and New York. The music publisher met Joplin only by chance; one story has it that he liked the music he heard one day when he stopped off for a beer.

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Minnesota Opera presents "The Turning of the Screw"

The Turn of the Screw was composed in 1954, based on the densely written Victorian ghost story by Henry James. With its 16 scenes plus prologue in two acts, it is definitely an opera to be seen, as well as heard. Britten intended, in fact, for the work to exist as a live opera, not to be listened to only for its music. Only three recordings of The Turn of the Screw even exist, one of which was conducted by Britten himself. As scenes from the Minnesota Opera's production demonstrate, the dramatically stunning visuals are a highlight of the opera.

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Shakespeare in vogue

You hear it all the time these days - Shakespeare is hip, Shakespeare is fashionable - but with composers, he’s hardly ever been unfashionable. And with his birthday upon us (April 23, by most accounts), it seems only fitting to celebrate some of the most famous classical works inspired by the Bard.

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Laughing through classical music

Classical-music comedy has a special place in the affections of music lovers and if there was a list of Frequently Asked Questions on this subject, these queries might be near the top.

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Happy birthday, Bach!

Every month MPR's music department asks a different individual to give us a list of five compact discs of his or her choosing. The criteria are strictly personal, and the choices cover a pretty wide gamut. But several discs come up again and again: Carlos Kleiber conducting Beethoven symphonies; Miles Davis and colleagues on their album Kind of Blue; and Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations.

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My operatic Valentine

It's the old story: boy gets shot by Cupid's bow and arrow, boy falls in love with girl. So old, in fact, that it forms the story of the very first opera. History has not been gentle with Jacopo Peri's Daphne – most of the music is lost, and the date of the first performance is unclear. But the tradition which it began has been resilient, and of the thousands of operas written since then, most have had some version of boy-meets-girl at their center. Here we take a quick look at some of opera's most famous love duets – and wish you a Happy Valentine's Day.

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The Saint-Gaudens in Boston Common:A Tribute to Colonel Shaw and His Colored Regiment

On October 31, 1998, Hugh Wolff and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra performed Three Places in New England by Charles Ives. These musical postcards evoke American places and experiences, including the memorial to Colonel Shaw and the 54th Regiment that fought in the Civil War. Here is the statue and it's inscription that inspired Ives.

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Titanic: it was sad when the great ship went down

It is one of the great received images of the twentieth century: As the stricken Titanic slips into the ocean, Wallace Hartley and his musicians remain steadfast at their posts, playing "Nearer, My God, to Thee." Music has become an indispensable part of the Titanic myth. With the big exhibit in St. Paul, thousands of Minnesotans are going to become Titanic buffs, if only temporarily, and we submit five very diverse examples of how musicians have responded to the story of the disaster.

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