In the 1950s, if you said the words "Cuban music," perhaps Desi Arnez, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo, singing "Babaloo" might come to mind. These days, it's more likely the Buena Vista Social Club.
On today's date back in 1932, George Gershwin had Cuban music on his mind when the New York Philharmonic...Episode details...
When spaceman Michael Rennie's flying saucer circled over Washington, DC, in the 1951 sci-fi classic, "The Day the Earth Stood Still," it did so to the accompaniment of an electronic instrument known as the Theremin. Its Russian inventor, Leon Theremin, was born in St. Petersburg on today's date...Episode details...
There was a time when German opera houses would have fought over the chance to premiere a brand-new opera by Richard Strauss. But by 1940, when Strauss finished a mythological opera entitled "The Love of Danae," there was a war on, and, on top of that, Strauss had fallen out of favor with...Episode details...
It's said that Nature abhors a vacuum—and so, apparently, did Richard Wagner, who devised a brass instrument to bridge a gap he perceived between the horns and the trombones in the orchestra of his day. And so the "Wagner tuba" was born, a brass instrument Wagner designed for the 1876 premiere of...Episode details...
Some have claimed that it was on today's date in 1877 that the American inventor Thomas Edison recorded his own voice reciting, "Mary had a little lamb" on a tin-foil cylinder of his own design. Now, other historians date the precise birth of the phonograph a bit earlier, others months later. In...Episode details...
As the proverbial saying goes: "Necessity is the mother of invention." It was, frankly, a matter of economic necessity that led a 36-year-old Austrian conductor named Clemens Krauss to program an all-Johann Strauss concert by the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Music Festival on today's...Episode details...
On today's date in 1813, William Henry Fry was born in Philadelphia. As a journalist, he was one of the most vociferous champions of American concert music, and put his money where his mouth was by becoming a composer himself.
Fry composed a number of programmatic works, including a "Niagara"...Episode details...
OK, if your dad wrote music for silent movies and you want to be a composer yourself, does that increase the odds that you may end up a film composer, too? At least that’s the case of David Raksin, who was born in Philadelphia in 1912, and who died in Los Angeles on today’s date in 2004.
After...Episode details...
Just about ANY time is a good time to be in Paris, but chances are, given your druthers, you wouldn't have chosen to be in Paris on this date in 1942. The city was occupied by German troops, and the World War had several more dismal years to grind on. Courageous acts of overt resistance to the...Episode details...
