Books & arts
9 October 2025
Two very different books mark the anniversaries of two very different composers
Books & arts
10 September 2025
Melody, rhythm, lyrics, arrangements: it’s the sonority of familiar music that we carry with us
Books & arts
24 July 2025
This year’s BBC Proms celebrate composer, conductor and audience favourite Pierre Boulez
Books & arts
3 July 2025
Is the act of composition itself a performance?
Books & arts
13 June 2025
What “Scarborough Fair” tells us about popular music-making
Books & arts
16 May 2025
What is Spotify doing to music?
Books & arts
4 April 2025
Thirty-six year after its premiere, there is finally a recording of Michael Tippett’s problematic last opera
Books & arts
13 March 2025
For writer Charles King, Handel’s Messiah offers “the staggering possibility that the world might turn out all right”
Books & arts
1 February 2025
Looking for the music in James Mangold’s biopic
Books & arts
9 December 2024
Musicologist Lawrence Kramer wants his readers to think differently about the sound of music and the music of sound
Books & arts
4 November 2024
A poem, a painting, a chance remark — almost anything can ignite the composer’s imagination
Books & arts
8 October 2024
Authenticity isn’t quite the right word for what Neal Peres Da Costa is aiming to achieve
Books & arts
10 September 2024
Composer Alexander Goehr swam against the postwar tide
Books & arts
13 August 2024
How do you pack the history of music into less than fifty thousand words?
Books & arts
8 July 2024
Despite her clean-living reputation, the great American singer was a risk taker
Books & arts
12 June 2024
The drive for musical authenticity needn’t always reach back
Books & arts
2 April 2024
In the wake of a war and the Holocaust, how should music commemorate?
Books & arts
9 February 2024
Packed with back story, a generation of TV themes showed producers to be taking music more seriously
Books & arts
15 December 2023
It’s not just slimmer royalty payments for his compositions that make our music writer look back wistfully
Books & arts
6 November 2023
The new Rolling Stones album circles back to the band’s earliest days
Books & arts
27 September 2023
How pianist Paul Grabowsky benefited from the generosity of the Wilfred brothers and other Indigenous musicians
Books & arts
4 September 2023
The many lives of Noël Coward, playwright, composer, director, actor and singer
Books & arts
9 August 2023
The Hungarian composer György Ligeti remained endlessly inquisitive
Books & arts
28 February 2023
Not everything famous musicians do is magic
Books & arts
3 February 2023
Does music really reflect its place of composition?
Books & arts
7 December 2022
How Doctor Who found its distinctive sounds
Books & arts
4 November 2022
A fresh musical performance can reveal unrecognised qualities
Books & arts
21 September 2022
Music played the role only it could play at the Queen’s funeral
Books & arts
7 September 2022
Pianist and composer Tim Stevens eventually returned to the jazz standards, and we have the pandemic to thank
From the archive
30 November 2021
The pleasures of eavesdropping on the Beatles with Peter Jackson