Blog
Articles on the hidden connections in music history: teachers and students, schools, and unexpected lines of succession.
Counterpoint by Post
In 1757, Johann Christian Bach sent an eight-voice Pater noster from Milan to Giovanni Martin in Bologna.
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Malko’s Counterpoint Inheritance
In the 1904/05 academic year, Nikolai Malko entered Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s special-fugue class at the St Petersburg Conservatory.
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Gauk Restores the Lost Repertoire
In 1913, Alexander Gauk entered Felix Blumenfeld’s piano class at the St Petersburg Conservatory. He had passed the examination for the middle piano...
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Two Hundred Gulden for Frescobaldi
In 1637, the Viennese court granted 200 gulden after Johann Froberger asked to be sent “to Rome to Frescobaldi.
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From Gade to Bargiel, Grieg, and Nielsen
On 24 September 1838, writing from Gothenburg, Niels Gade described Andreas Berggreen in two words: > “teacher and friend” Niels Gade added that he owed...
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Zellbell from Storkyrkan to the Royal Academy
On 30 December 1735, Ferdinand Zellbell’s father wrote to Carl Gustaf Tessin about his sixteen-year-old son.
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Snitkovsky Between Stolyarsky and Oistrakh
In 1940, seven-year-old Semyon Snitkovsky passed a competitive entrance process and entered the violin department of Pyotr Stolyarsky’s school in Odesa.
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Baroque Genealogy Without Direct Descent
Girolamo Frescobaldi died in Rome in 1643. Modern chronologies place Johann von Kerll’s Roman study in 1648 or 1649, when he went to Giacomo Carissimi.
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Volkmann’s Saxon Roots
In 1841, Robert Volkmann settled in Pest after a period teaching singing in Prague. Born in 1815 in Lommatzsch, Meissen, Saxony, he had trained within the...
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Tatiana Goldfarb and Three Teachers
In 1932, Татьяна Гольдфарб completed her studies at the Odesa Conservatory. Over the next nine years she studied in Kyiv and Moscow, entered the 1937...
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From Luzzaschi to Frescobaldi
On 2 June 1624, Джироламо Фрескобальди dedicated his Capricci fatti sopra diversi soggetti to Alfonso d’Este.
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A Classroom Across 115 Years
From 1852 to 1854, Николай Заремба studied music theory with Адольф Маркс in Berlin. More than a century later, in 1967, Филипп Хиршхорн, trained by a...
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Nathan Perelman’s Long Lesson
A boy sits at a piano while a country comes apart around him. Outside, revolution and civil war are redrawing borders, breaking institutions, and...
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Nikolayev’s School, Decoded
Most celebrated teachers leave behind a recognizable style. Their students share a particular tone, a way of shaping phrases, perhaps even the same...
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Many Voices, One Piano
The familiar portrait is irresistible: an exiled composer alone at the piano, transforming private sorrow into nocturnes, mazurkas, and ballades of almost...
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Powdered Wigs, Leather Jackets
In the popular imagination, the history of music is often compartmentalized into rigid genres, separated by high walls of time and style.
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Whispered Secrets of the Studio
The history of Western classical music is often taught as a series of distinct, geological strata: the orderly gardens of the Classical era, the...
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The Myth of the Lone Virtuoso
There’s a familiar myth about great pianists: that they appear like comets—solitary, blazing, unrepeatable.
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Touch, Timing, Taste
A great pianist can make a single note feel inevitable—so right it seems as if the composer placed it there by hand.
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Bellini’s Mathematical Prison
In 1819, a handsome, melancholy eighteen-year-old named Vincenzo Bellini stepped off a boat in Naples.
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Wagner’s Ring Without Wagner
In the vast, chaotic constellation of music history, we are often taught to navigate by the brightest stars.
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Voice as a Weapon
In the glittering, candlelit world of 18th-century Europe, music was not merely an art form; it was a bloodsport.
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The Venetian Blueprint
The Invisible Relay: How a Deathbed Gift in Venice Sparked the Messiah
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The Notebook That Made Bach
The Moonlight Manuscript: Unlocking the Secret Musical DNA of J.S. Bach The image is one of the most enduring myths in music history: a young, orphan...
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