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The Dominant, 1 April 1928 edition, OUP Music

Nicholas Bugsworthy: an unknown Tudor composer?

By Simon Wright

Simon Wright digs into the curious history of an almost forgotten Tudor composer, Nicholas Bugsworthy. Thanks to an insert in OUP’s in-house magazine, ‘The Dominant’, published on 1 April 1928, Sir Richard Runciman Terry was able to bring the music of this prolific composer into the public domain. Simon Wright picks up where Terry left off, considering, amongst other things, the origins of a curious tune almost certainly shows the earliest version of musical patterns later to become threaded within Irving Berlin’s 1911 hit ragtime song “Everybody’s Doin’ It Now.”

“Through Gilded Trellises”: a reflection on one hundred years of Façade

By Simon Wright

The making of Façade “Poetry is more like a crystal globe, with Truth imprisoned in it, like a fly in amber. The poet is the magician who fashions the crystal globe. But the reader is the magician who can find in these scintillating flaws, or translucent depths, some new undiscovered land.” Osbert Sitwell, writing in 1921 […]

"The Musical Brain" published by Oxford University Press

Five things musicians should know about the brain

By Lois Svard

Understanding brain basics can help us study and teach music with greater efficiency and confidence, thus giving us more freedom in performance to concentrate on communicating the emotional essence of the music.

Grove Music’s 2023 spoof article contest is now open!

By Scott Gleason

The Grove Music Online spoof article contest is now open for 2023!

A Winter Breviary: Q&A with poet Rebecca Gayle Howell

By Rebecca Gayle Howell

A Winter Breviary is a triptych of carols that tells the story of a person walking in the woods on solstice night. This pilgrim—she, he, they—searches for hope, the hope they cannot name, or hear or see. And still, they walk deeper and deeper into the dark.

From orchestra to cello solo: the gentle art of arranging music

By David Blackwell

Art has always been transformed from one form to another: books to films, plays to operas, even music to novels—Beethoven’s Eroica and Anthony Burgess’s Napoleon Symphony, for example. Within music, composers have been equally ready to adapt and modify.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: preserving the publishing legacy

By Simon Wright

In the Vaughan Williams’s 150th anniversary year, his primary publisher Oxford University Press are donating around 60 items to the British Library, to be preserved and made available to musicians and researchers. These items include artefacts from all stages in the publishing process, from conductor’s marked scores, copyist’s copies and handwritten notes by the composer. In this blog, Simon Wright highlights some interesting features amongst the titles being donated.

Eight composers whose music we should know

By Kathy Blackwell

From Teresa Carreno to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, this blog post features composers who experienced barriers to music education within their lifetimes, leading to their exclusion from the historical canon.

Memorable years, formative years: why do boys stop singing in their teens?

By Martin Ashley

There are many adult men who sang as small boys but now either don’t sing at all or who have had long gaps in their lives with no singing. Professor Martin Ashley discusses how to support adolescent boys as their voices change.

Why we all need more Lesbian Dance Theory

By Samuel N. Dorf

Last month a Member of Congress joined Fox News to claim President Joe Biden is “robbing hard working Americans to pay for Karen’s daughter’s degree in lesbian dance theory” in response to the announcement that the President was providing $20,000 in debt relief for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for many other borrowers.

Ralph Vaughan Williams and the art of the amateur

By Eric Saylor

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) was one of the twentieth century’s great champions of and advocates for amateur music-making. Explore his views on the amateur vs professional relationship, and discover what he might have thought of America’s Got Talent, and other reality talent shows.

Comparing Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Beethoven’s Third

By Urmila Seshagiri

How does the formal originality of Jacob’s Room, its dark tenor, fit into the arc of Woolf’s career? I found unexpected and illuminating answers to this question in an all-Beethoven concert at Carnegie Hall.

A summer playlist inspired by Oxford World’s Classics

By Ashendri Wickremasinghe

To help curate your summer playlist and reading list, here are 10 songs and Oxford World’s Classics we recommend you add to your rotation:

Classical music, privilege, and ghosts of the French Revolution

By Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden

The word privilege is a lightning rod in United States culture. For some, it indexes systemic inequities shaped by race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, while for others, it represents a “woke” vocabulary used to enforce political correctness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, accusations of privilege have reached the classical music world.

Recalling hymn tunes by Ralph Vaughan Williams

By Robert Mann

Hymn tunes of Ralph Vaughan Williams find consensus: undisputed quality. The foremost English composer of his generation is credited with composing, adapting, or arranging more than 80 tunes set to important hymns of our faith.

Eurovision 2022 in tempore belli: voices of the people, protest, and peace

By Philip V. Bohlman

Months before the Grand Finale of the Eurovision Song Contest on May 14, 2022 in Turin, Italy, Ukraine was able to claim both moral and musical victory with its entry, the Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania” (Stephanie). Together with the official videos of all other national entries, “Stefania” began circulating globally on multiple internet platforms in the early weeks of 2022, even as the threat of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine intensified and then reached the full force of invasion on 24 February.