In one of his poems entitled The Ballad of East and West, the British poet Rudyard Kipling penned a line of verse which was destined to enter the English language as an often-quote cliché: ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’
On today’s date in 1963, East DID...Episode details...
In 1967, the Beatles released a song about “a girl with kaleidoscope eyes,” but on today’s date in 1870, it was “a girl with ENAMEL eyes” that was the subject of a ballet that debuted in today’s date at the Paris Opéra.
The ballet’s full title was “Coppelia, or the Girl with Enamel Eyes,” and...Episode details...
On today’s date in 1911, Edward Elgar conducted the first performance of his Second Symphony with the Queen’s Hall Orchestra.
Now, Elgar’s First Symphony had generated a lot of excitement when it debuted late in 1908, and Elgar’s big Violin Concerto, which Fritz Kreisler premiered in 1910, was...Episode details...
In 1805, a 56-year-old Italian man of letters immigrated to America.
Now, there wasn’t much call for Italian men of letters in America in those days, so over the next twenty years, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, he was, by turns, a grocer, distiller, seller of patent medicines, and...Episode details...
Today we offer more proof (if you still need it) that the world of MUSIC, like the world in general, is getting smaller all the time.
On today’s date in 1999, the Houston Symphony, led by its German conductor Christoph Eschenbach, gave the first performance of this music, a work by the Chinese...Episode details...
Popular as the imaginary purple dinosaur named “Barney” might be with American kids, in the 1990s he got some competition from another T-Rex named “Sue.” Sue was the nearly complete fossilized skeleton of a female T-Rex discovered in South Dakota, named after the woman who found her, a...Episode details...
On today’s date in 1846, a Grand Festival Concert took place at New York’s Castle Garden, a popular spot for 19th century Manhattanites to enjoy fireworks, balloon ascensions, ice cream, and band concerts.
The band on this occasion consisted of some 400 vocalists and instrumentalists, including...Episode details...
It’s a little ironic that at the height of his career, the great Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saens was more appreciated in England and the United States than in his native France.
And so, it’s perhaps not surprising that his Symphony No. 3, subtitled the “Organ Symphony,” premiered not in...Episode details...
On today’s date in 1980, at 8:32 a.m. Pacific Time to be exact, Mount St. Helens erupted, its north face collapsing in a massive rock avalanche. Pressurized gasses from the volcano flattened 150 miles of forest, and killed every living thing within a ten-mile radius – including 57 unfortunate...Episode details...
