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It’s a curious thing how an artist who has reached a certain level of creative maturity becomes somewhat of a prisoner to idiosyncrasy. Many composers, to take music as an example, have some kind of musical trademark. Some exhibit their signature flourishes subtly or almost imperceptibly, while others do us the convenience of posting a big, blinking, neon sign in the sky. At the moment, I’m starting to think that there’s a lot in the music of film composer James Horner that is big, blinking, and neon....

I can’t speak from experience, but I bet the first half of the 20th century was a God awful time to be living. It was a time when war and economic crisis scathed the face of humanity. (Actually, we haven’t come very far in this respect.) It also was a time when so much about art and its dissemination was necessarily political, and that is a terrible thing. I sympathize with men like Prokofiev and Shostakovich—artists whose musical output was, at least for some portion of their careers, dictated by the aesthetic counsel of the Soviet Union....

From a distance, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky look much the same. Fact is, one name rarely ever surfaces without some mention of the other, and if you like music by one, chances are you also enjoy music by the other (convenient given the sheer number of classical albums that pair their works together). The opinion inherent in their seeming inseparability is that their works demonstrate an uncanny gift for melody and emotional expression....

The term descant hearkens back to my youth as a choir boy, when my musical experiences were dominated by music of the church. We sang a number of hymns and psalms, and our director would often select a small group of us to sing a descant — known to me then only as an aria-like soprano part above the rest of the choir. It forced us to exercise the upper range of our voices and was very unforgiving of even the slightest deviations in pitch....

This last Saturday marked the 100th anniversary of Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto. I don’t know if there were any performances anywhere to commemorate the piece, but then again, we don’t often commemorate pieces. Usually, it’s the life of the composer we celebrate. Still, I like to think about the significance of a musical work coming into existence, to fill an ethereal space where once there existed a musical void. Before November 28th, 1909, no one knew what the third concerto by Rachmaninoff sounded like, save the composer himself....