The spiky, hormonal whiff of adolescence clings to Hector Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique” Op. 14. A classical music gateway drug, it stands for sophistication as clove cigarettes, Smirnoff Ice Green Apple, or the stems at the bottom of the baggie stand for sophistication, that is to say: not at all. All dark premonitions, opium, orgies, beheadings, […]

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Listen, none of us made good decisions in our 20s. Among the more anodyne of my offenses was that, for about a year or so at the start of that decade, my soundtrack of choice for amorous congress was “Má vlast.” I was clinging to the last Romantic edges of my late-teenage years, and in […]

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“The effect is horrible: And everybody declares it sublime,” said George Bernard Shaw of the massed “Messiah” performances of the Victorian age. “Handel is not a mere composer in England: he is an institution…the audience stands up, as if in church, while the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus is being sung. It is the nearest sensation to the […]

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When I was in graduate school, I took an advanced musicianship class, which mainly demonstrated that I was not an advanced musician. One of the components was ear training and dictation. Our task was usually to notate a series of dense chords and tricky modulations the teacher played from the piano. One class, she played […]

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When talking about films and filmmakers he admired, French New Wave legend François Truffaut said, “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.” […]

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Here’s a reason to hate “The Four Seasons”: I last heard “Spring”—unbidden—as I passed through east London’s Walthamstow Bus Station during a routine commute home. Realizing that piping classical music into its stations was a cost-effective means to deter young people from hanging around, Transport for London started playing Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven in 2006. Since […]

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If you remember the 1980s, you remember Ravel’s “Boléro.” Although the work became a fixture on orchestral programs shortly after its premiere in 1928, the ’80s was arguably the decade of peak “Boléro” saturation, bookended by the soundtrack for the 1979 Dudley Moore comedy, “10,” and Frank Zappa’s 1991 album, “The Best Band You Never […]

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There’s a scene in UK sitcom “Peep Show” where Mark, a socially-awkward credit manager rapidly approaching middle age, finds himself at a history professor’s private soirée, despite his never studying history and living hundreds of miles away—all in the desperate pursuit of a woman who was nice to him, once, in a shoe shop. Professor […]

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When Tolstoy began working on what would become War and Peace, his 1869 opus that moves fluidly between historical novel and philosophical treatise, he initially had a completely different story in mind. Rather than craft a constellation of parallel and intersecting histories between 1805 and 1820 (with a particular focus on Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of […]

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