pplpod

John Adams grew up in a musical New England household, learned clarinet from his father, and met Duke Ellington as a child, then hit a wall at Harvard where serialism dominated composition classes while he blasted Hendrix, Dylan, and the Beatles in his dorm. A copy of John Cage's book Silence, mailed by his mother, gave him permission to drive to San Francisco, build a homemade synthesizer he nick...

In 1878 Johannes Brahms grew a massive beard and immediately used it to approach lifelong friends on the street, deadpan, introducing himself as a stranger named music director Müller. The same man burned more than 20 completed string quartets before allowing one to be published. This episode explores the space between the prankster and the perfectionist, beginning with his working-class Hamburg c...

The same chord progression that signals a bride walking down the aisle also powers late-1990s pop-punk anthems, and both trace back to a 17th-century German organist too often dismissed as a classical one-hit wonder. This episode moves past the ubiquity of the Canon in D to tell the story of Johann Pachelbel himself, born in Nuremberg in 1653 to a wine dealer, admitted to the University of Altdorf...

In the early 1980s a young composer born Mamoru Fujisawa adopted a stage name built on a cross-linguistic pun on Quincy Jones and became Joe Hisaishi. This episode explores how a boy from mountainous Nagano Prefecture, trained by ear through the Suzuki method from age four and raised on hundreds of movies a year with his father, developed the dual fluency in sound and visual storytelling that made...

Imagine Niagara Falls stopping on a dime and fluttering like a hummingbird. That physical contradiction is the story of Joan Sutherland, the Australian soprano the Italians named La Stupenda, whose enormous voice somehow possessed the rapid-fire agility normally reserved for light, bird-like instruments. This episode follows her from a Sydney childhood spent imitating her mezzo-soprano mother, thr...

At seven, Jessye Norman blanked on the second stanza of a hymn at a local competition and placed third. She later joked it was the last memory slip she ever suffered in public. This episode follows the girl from Augusta, Georgia, born in 1945 into a musical family, who sang gospel at four, discovered the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on a birthday radio at nine, and heard Marian Anderson and Leont...

In 1948 a Tel Aviv conservatory rejected a three-year-old because he was physically too small to hold a violin. His mother bought him a toy one instead, and he taught himself melodies by ear. That child was Itzhak Perlman. This episode traces his journey from the radio broadcast of Jascha Heifetz that sparked his obsession, through the polio he contracted at four that left him playing seated with...

Picture the composer of the most sweeping fantasy film score of the 21st century, then picture the same man decades earlier in a fuzzy bee costume playing saxophone behind Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi on late-night television. This episode charts the improbable evolution of Howard Shore, born in Toronto in 1946, who befriended Lorne Michaels at summer camp at 13, studied at Berklee, played in the...

Close your eyes and picture outer space, and you probably hear sweeping strings and terrifying brass. The man who invented that sound did not care about astronomy at all. Gustav Holst was an exhausted part-time girls' school music teacher obsessed with horoscopes, suffering from neuritis so severe he could barely hold a pen. This episode chronicles the agonizing creation of The Planets, from the 1...

A pianist walks on stage in 1920s Paris, sets a loaded revolver on top of the piano, and starts to play. That was George Antheil, the self-styled bad boy of music who flunked out of Trenton Central High School, secured a 20-year stipend from Mary Louise Curtis Bok, badgered Ernest Bloch into teaching him, and moved into an apartment above Shakespeare and Company where Sylvia Beach introduced him t...

In January 2023 at Carnegie Hall, Yuja Wang played all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos plus the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in a single evening, paused for 20 minutes while medics treated an audience member who collapsed, then sat back down, finished the marathon, and played an encore. This episode traces how a pianist builds that kind of bulletproof focus, starting with a girl in Beijing in...

A pregnant Jewish immigrant, stung by a New York landlady who casually announced she would not rent to Jews, vowed her child would wear his heritage so loudly he could never be caught off guard again. She named him Yehudi, meaning the Jew. This episode follows that boy, born in 1916, from a solo debut in New York at 10 and a spellbinding Berlin performance of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms at 12, to...

Imagine composing for a regime that changes its fundamental ideology four times in a few decades, where the wrong musical style could cost you your livelihood or your life. That was the reality for Thomas Tallis, a devout Catholic who became the premier musician for Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. This episode maps how he reinvented his craft again and again, from the dissolution o...

Two turn signals at a red light drift out of sync, spiral through chaotic syncopation, and snap back into unison. That hypnotic mechanical drift is the key to understanding Steve Reich, the philosophy major and jazz drummer who revolutionized modern music by exposing the hidden processes of sound itself. This episode follows Reich from a bicoastal childhood of cross-country train rides, through a...

The man who wrote Mars, the Bringer of War, arguably the most violent orchestral music ever conceived, was a shy, asthmatic vegetarian socialist with terrible eyesight and a nerve condition that ruined his hands. This episode explores the staggering gap between Gustav Holst and his music, following him from a family of working musicians who invented the aristocratic von in their surname, through y...

It plays at weddings, funerals, and rock concerts, and your brain recognizes those eight chords before the melody even begins. Yet Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D was lost for centuries and survived only because a single manuscript copy, transcribed sometime between 1838 and 1842, sat unplayed in the Berlin State Library until scholar Gustav Beckmann published it in 1919. This episode tells the biog...

On a freezing January night in 1941, four prisoners in a German POW camp played a new piece on a piano with sticking keys, a cello missing a string, a clarinet, and a violin. That premiere of the Quartet for the End of Time was the birth of a new musical language, and this episode traces the life of the man who wrote it. Olivier Messiaen was born in Avignon in 1908 to a Shakespeare-translating fat...

At the 2006 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Turin, Luciano Pavarotti appeared to deliver a transcendent live performance of the famous tenor aria from Puccini's Turandot, but in the sub-freezing air he was lip-syncing to a pre-recorded track to protect his vocal cords. This episode traces the biography of that single piece of music, beginning with the opera's dark 1920s premise: a princess who...

Celebrated today as the father of modern emotional music and the pioneer of opera, Claudio Monteverdi was attacked in his own time for destroying the sacred rules of art, mistreated and fired by his ducal employer, robbed by highwaymen, and driven to alchemy and the priesthood before writing commercial hits in his seventies. This episode begins in Cremona in 1567, where an apothecary's son publish...

In late 1970s Bedford, England, a boy taking apart electronics to build analog synthesizers after hearing Kraftwerk's Autobahn was also receiving records by Philip Glass, Terry Riley and John Cage from his local milkman. This episode explores how Max Richter, born in Hamelin, West Germany in 1966, combined formal piano training in Bach and Beethoven with Tangerine Dream, Vangelis and American mini...

A Juilliard-trained violinist playing with the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet, and later the first conductor ever to win a MacArthur genius grant, applied to Juilliard's conducting program and was rejected three times. This episode traces Marin Alsop from her 1956 birth to two professional string players in New York City, through Juilliard's pre-college division, a detour into...

The invisible hand behind the lump in your throat during Nomadland and The Father belongs to Ludovico Einaudi, one of the most streamed classical artists on the planet and a composer the classical establishment routinely dismisses. This episode explores his birth in Turin in 1955 into Italy's intellectual and political elite: a grandfather, Luigi Einaudi, who served as president of Italy from 1948...

A two-year-old in early 1980s Shenyang watches a tuxedoed cartoon cat pound out Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in the Tom and Jerry short The Cat Concerto, and a lifelong obsession with the piano begins. This episode explores how Lang Lang's parents, musicians whose ambitions were derailed when they were sent to rural rice farms during the Cultural Revolution, projected their deferred dreams ont...

A young pianist at Juilliard listens to his peers and realizes he will never be the best performer in the room, so he pivots to composition and ends up engineering the emotional life of modern cinema. This episode follows John Towner Williams from his 1932 birth in New York as the son of jazz percussionist Johnny Williams, through UCLA, a 1951 stint in the United States Air Force arranging for mil...

In 1951, John Cage walked into an anechoic chamber at Harvard expecting to hear pure nothingness, and instead heard a high whine and a low thrum that the engineer explained were his own nervous system and his blood circulating. This episode traces how that discovery, combined with years of studying Zen Buddhism under Daisetz Suzuki at Columbia and the courage he drew from Robert Rauschenberg's all...