Emily Boyer

Louise Dumont was studying piano and composition when she met a young flute student, Aristide Farrenc. They fell in love and got married. Rather than follow convention and give up her creative pursuits, Louise Farrenc became a trailblazing professional. Hear her Trio for Piano, Flute, and Cello.

Los Angeles was home for composer Eric Whitacre for 25 years. After friends’ tragic loss caused by the Palisades Fire, he responded with music. The title, The Pacific Has No Memory, comes from a line in one of his favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption.

Do you think of music as colorful? Composers combine the sounds of different instruments like a rainbow of choices on a painter’s palette. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s artistry is on display with the colors he combines in his Quintet for Piano and Winds.

Cue the fireworks! It’s Lunar New Year today! Ride into the Year of the Horse with music and musicians from China and Chinese heritage, like pianist Yin Chengzong predicting a year of joy with Happy Loso.

It’s Monday. Just when we finish one week, another one starts. If getting through the day feels like a Sisyphean task, change it up by adding an Afro-Brazilian beat listening to Sisyphus in the Big City by Ricardo Herz.

Valentine’s Day is tomorrow and I have music to get you in a romantic mood. From Romances by Robert Schumann that will make your heart leap to a tender love song by Josef Suk.

“A new birth of freedom” was Abraham Lincoln’s hope for America in his Gettysburg Address. On Lincoln’s birthday, hear orchestra and chorus bring his enduring words to life in This Sacred Ground by David Diamond.

If you feel adrift, composer Nicole Piunno reminds us that music matters, and it can take us to a world that is deeper than the one we touch. Find hope on the journey through her piece Sojourn.

Legendary American soprano Leontyne Price turns 99 years old today. Her story began in Mississippi, and includes 13 Grammy wins and the spotlight on opera stages around the world. We’ll celebrate Leontyne Price’s birthday with her dramatic performance of music by Richard Wagner.

Connecticut-born poet Katherine Garrison Chapin wrote Plain-Chant for America in collaboration with composer William Grant Still in 1941. She says their work addresses, “the gap between totalitarianism and the American democracy in which I believed.”