There are many different ways for a composer to go against type: first, there’s the Drastic Turnabout where the “against type” is actually the first incarnation of the composer’s style; next is the Perpetual Chameleon; and a third is the Musical Traitor.

How could any student enrolled in a reputable conservatory need to be persuaded to be interested in the great legacy of past composers?

A look at the rarest of rara aves in the annals of double-threat composers: successful composers who sustain wholly separate, successful careers as artists in other forms.

An artist’s view of a fellow artist has a different kind of validity than a critic’s or scholar’s.

From a country that produced such world-class writers as Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett and that is so intensely musical in its folk culture, why has there never been a “great” Irish classical composer?

Who can afford to be a practitioner of that most labor-intensive, under-compensated, high-overhead of art forms, art music composition, unless you live in music-crazed Finland.

Remarkable as Elliott Carter’s productive longevity is, he is far from the only composer who has given the lie to the Mozartean mythology that composing genius traces an early trajectory.

In the 21st century it’s become almost impossible for a classical musician—let alone a critic—to achieve optimum product placement in the American marketplace, but Alex Ross has succeeded.

Clearly Bernstein still matters, but does West Side Story, in today’s musical theater world?

It’s one thing to say that the vast majority of history’s composers remain unknown. But how many of history’s known (and even “great”) composers are, effectively, “mis-known”-either through insufficient performance of the bulk of their output, or through actual suppression of significant chunks of their oeuvres?