the music educator blog

Can’t wait for the new Star Wars movie to come out in 2015? Neither can we.

Erik Satie was a French composer whose iconoclastic musical experimentation paved the way for many of the avant-garde styles of the early twentieth century.

The piece that we know today as “Greensleeves” originated as a sixteenth century English broadside ballad. A broadside ballad was an early form of popular music in which an author penned lyrics that fit the tune of a well known folk song; a publisher would then print the lyrics up on a single sheet of newspaper (a “broadside”) and sell in the street.

American composer Billy Strayhorn is best known as Duke Ellington’s longtime arranger and collaborator, but this does not quite capture the strong influence that Strayhorn has had on Ellington’s work and on the world of jazz in general.

Ernesto Lecuona y Casado is arguably one of Cuba’s greatest composers. He was both versatile and prolific, composing over 400 songs, 170 piano pieces, 37 orchestral pieces, 11 film scores and numerous other works including zarzuelas, ballets and operas.

Back in the days when traveling circuses were a major form of popular entertainment, no composer was better known than Karl King.

If you’re the parent or teacher of a musical child, you are almost certainly familiar with “Boomwhackers,” those color-coded plastic tubes that kids love to smack.

Ralph Vaughan Williams is part of a great tradition of British composers who transcribed melodies from the vast oral tradition of folk music and then incorporated these tunes into their own orchestral and choral pieces.

Igor Stravinsky was a virtually unknown composer in St. Petersburg Russia when he was discovered by the famous Parisian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev at a concert in 1909, and from that moment began one of the most productive and iconic artistic partnerships of the early twentieth century.

Originally written for a floating celebration on the Thames river, George Frideric Handel’s Water Music has remained a popular and familiar suite of tunes ever since.