Location isn’t usually important in film comedies the way say, Los Angels is vital to dramas like Chinatown or Chicago to action-thrillers like The Fugitive. Comedies trade in laughs and laughs come from people and situations and animals with digestive ailments. Places don’t crack us up. Then why do I never forget that one of [...]

This week’s trivia SMS informed that J.S. Bach was imprisoned in 1717. What could he possibly have done wrong? Oh, he just got a new job, that’s all. His soon-to-be-former employer, the Duke of Weimar wanted nothing of it and tossed Bach in the slammer. Bach made good use of the time, however–he spent the [...]

This week’s self esteem-busting trivia text message chronicled the fact that Mozart wrote over 30 symphonies between the age of 8 and 19. Crazy talk, right? Right. Another fun fact. His birth name was super long! Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. Yup. Below is an excerpt from Mozart’s Symphony No. 1, written at the age [...]

b. January 29, 1862 in Bradford, Yorkshire, England d. June 10, 1934 Grez-sur-Loing, France Born to German parents, Frederick Delius was born Fritz Albert Theodore Delius; he anglicized his name in the early 1900s. Delius spent time apprenticing with his father, a wool distributor, before leaving for the United States to run an orange plantation [...]

Do you get seasick? Igor Stravinsky didn’t. He got sea drunk. A big difference, he said! If you’re subscribed to our weekly trivia SMS, you saw his direct quote–”I never am seasick. Never. I am sea drunk.” We know and love Stravinsky for his ground-breaking and riot-inducing Rite of Spring. Another bit of trivia — [...]

Franz Peter Schubert, a chamber music extraordinaire and one of the few truly Viennese composers, lived a short but very prolific life. He’s our Composer of the Week and he rocks! b. January 31, 1797 in Vienna, Austria d. November 19, 1828 Schubert was the youngest of five out of nine surviving children. He was [...]

Dmitri Shostakovich was a dynamic composer who delicately balanced performing in his preferred avant-garde fashion, writing commissioned communist-sympathetic works for films, plays and ballets, along with the overall requisite that he show Leninist support. How tiring it must have been! Shostakovich is our dynamo Composer of the Week. b. September 25, 1906, St Petersburg d. [...]

b. Oct. 24, 1929 in Charleston, West Virginia George Crumb, American composer extraordinaire, engaged in quite an extensive musical education — he studied at the Mason College of Music in Charleston, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the Berlin Conservatory. Crumb received a Rockefeller grant in 1964 [...]

b. June 29, 1911 in New York, NY d. December 24, 1975 in Los Angeles, CA Bernard Herrmann began studying composition and conducting at NYU while still in high school. He went on to Juilliard where he remained for two years, however, he found the school to be too conservative. In 1933, Herrmann formed the [...]

Antonin Dvorak was basically a rock star. So much so that some computer keyboards were named after him. b. September 8, 1841 in Prague d. May 1, 1904 in Prague Dvorak was an early musical talent and made quick gains on the violin upon beginning his studies at age 5. He studied at the only [...]