Podcasts about fifth symphony

You see, I want you to own your specialness.To not be one of those people caught in the trap of being busy being busy. To be a genuine builder of something that is beautiful, inspiring and great.Yes, I want you to make your Taj Mahal. Create your Fifth Symphony. Make your Mona Lisa.Your life's just too precious to be postponing the pushing of your magic out into the world.This is what my latest book The Wealth Money Can't Buy is all about. Real wealth versus fake success. True winning versus spending your life climbing a mountain, only to find out at the end that it was the wrong one. You can order it now by clicking here.FOLLOW ROBIN SHARMA:InstagramFacebookTwitterYouTube

The cool of the Arctic meets the warmth of Italy. The brooding, majestic themes of Sibelius' Fifth Symphony evoke the remote landscapes of conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali's native Finland. Tchaikovsky transports listeners to a Roman carnival in his Capriccio Italien. Seong-Jin Cho, lauded for his “expert music-making … miraculous in its execution” (The New York Times), takes on Prokofiev's incendiary Second Piano Concerto. This program will also be performed at Wheaton College on Friday, February 28. Learn more: cso.org/performances/24-25/cso-classical/seong-jin-cho-plays-prokofiev/

It's one of the most famous pieces of classical music, but why? The beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has an iconic status, but is it one of the best openings to a piece of music? YolanDa, Tom and Cassi dig deeper into those famous four notes and along the way they share other opening bars which are just as recognisable, arresting, or scary. It's a tricky passage to play in sync with other players, so they discuss tips and tricks to ensure it gets off to a successful start. Plus, in the quiz Tom makes a fruit-related promise he's surely going to live to regret…#PitchMeClassicalInstagram: @londonphilharmonicorchestra TikTok: @lporchestraBluesky: @lporchestraFacebook: @londonphilharmonicorchestra YouTube: @londonphilharmonicorchestra Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Professor Luis Seco is a mathematician, educator, and investor. Among many other titles and achievements, he is the Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, Director of the quant research hub Risklab, Chair of the Centre for Sustainable Development at the Fields Institute, and co-founder of the asset management firm Sigma Analysis & Management Ltd. Got all that?! This one was really fun, and not just because Luis is a fellow quant. We discuss how maths resembles Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the future of the ‘metaversity', the most important lesson Luis gives his students, why investing isn't what it used to be, and much more. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. For the full transcript, episode takeaways, and bucketloads of other goodies designed to make you go, “Hmm, that's interesting!”, check out our Substack. Important Links: Website Twitter YouTube Show Notes: What Luis learned from the Beethoven of mathematics “Mathematics is the language computers speak” The role of community in an increasingly confusing world Lifelong education & the voyage to the human brain Why to teach is to be human Timebinding & social media as a steam valve What matters more - content or communication? Math as a social science: quantifying risk in a nonlinear world From paper, to numbers, to images: The changing nature of data Why the future of education lies in decentralization Swarm solutions & why we're in the century of collaboration Metaversities & the case for bringing your kids to work Why managing money is now based on words, not numbers Luis as Emperor of the World MORE! Books Mentioned: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; by Douglas Adams The Two Cultures; by C.P. Snow Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; by Robert M. Pirsig Manhood of Humanity; by Alfred Korzybski How to Win Friends and Influence People; by Dale Carnegie The Myth of 1926: How Much Do We Know About Long-Term Returns on U.S. Stocks?; by Edward F. Mcquarrie

Give your customers stunning goods. The majority is caught up in the “relentless release of stuff.”Most producers rush to deliver many materials rather than investing the time and painstaking care to handcraft a single masterpiece that stands the test of time.I go into great depth on this pivotal subject in The 5AM Club yet for now please consider this: it's wiser to make one Fifth Symphony versus many pieces of mediocrity [that never establish domain dominance].FOLLOW ROBIN SHARMA:InstagramFacebookTwitterYouTube

With his Fifth Symphony, Shostakovich outwitted Soviet authorities with the finesse of a double agent. Threatened by Stalin's regime, the composer skillfully appeased Soviet officials with this gripping work packed with triumphant Russian themes, but also subversive satire and daring irony. Chief conductor of the Ravinia Festival Marin Alsop also leads the CSO in a captivating work about Harriet Tubman and a beloved Chopin concerto featuring pianist Lukáš Vondráček. Learn more: cso.org/performances/24-25/cso-classical/alsop-and-vondracek

There are two primary sources of unhappiness: living focused on the wrong things, and living in a way not in harmony with what matters most to you. Today, McKay opens our eyes to see why we need to discover what matters most to us and how to live in harmony with our values to live a happy and purposeful life. In this episode, McKay tells the story of the integrity possessed by Tony Finau, a man who valued honesty and decided to live with his values. He goes on to discuss the reasons why many are unhappy, the importance of deciding what matters most to you, and ways to identify your governing values. As McKay makes clear here today, when you become a light, and not a judge, and write down your governing values, you become set on your way to a happier and better life. The Finer Details of This Episode: - Tony Finau's integrity- The sources of unhappiness in life- Why you have to decide what matters most- How to live in harmony with what matters most- Beethoven's Fifth Symphony- the pursuit of what matters- How do you determine what matters most to you?- Ways to identify your governing values- Be a light, not a judge- Living in harmony with your chosen values- The power of planning your day Quotes: “To be happy and to pursue a purposeful life we have to decide what matters most and then seek to live in harmony with what matters.” “A deal is a deal. A handshake is a handshake. Integrity is integrity.” “It seems like selfishness, operating without common respect, and other such things, are the trades growing in our society.” “Be yourself, but be that perfectly.” “Our daily actions are in line with what matters most to us.” “Our purpose in life is to become the best we can be, to become a person of noble actions and virtues.” “We only have one life on this earth. I mean, I haven't heard of anyone going around for a second try, and if we aren't doing what matters most, then what in fact are we doing?” “You must take responsibility for your belief window and remove the erroneous beliefs on that window.” Show Links: Open Your Eyes with McKay Christensen

The majority is caught up in the “relentless release of stuff.” Most producers rush to deliver many materials rather than investing the time and painstaking care to handcraft a single masterpiece that stands the test of time. It's wiser to make one Fifth Symphony versus many pieces of mediocrity [that never establish domain dominance].My new book “The Wealth Money Can't Buy” is full of fresh ideas and original tools that I'm absolutely certain will cause quantum leaps in your positivity, productivity, wellness, and happiness. You can order it now by clicking here.FOLLOW ROBIN SHARMA:InstagramFacebookTwitterYouTube

You see, I want you to own your specialness. To not be one of those people caught in the trap of being busy being busy. To be a genuine builder of something that is beautiful, inspiring and great. Yes, I want you to make your Taj Mahal. Create your Fifth Symphony. Make your Mona Lisa. Your life's just too precious to be postponing the pushing of your magic out into the world.My new book “The Wealth Money Can't Buy” is full of fresh ideas and original tools that I'm absolutely certain will cause quantum leaps in your positivity, productivity, wellness, and happiness. You can order it now by clicking here.FOLLOW ROBIN SHARMA:InstagramFacebookTwitterYouTube 

Laura Jackson, Reno Phil Music Director and Conductor, and Jennifer Tibben, director of the Reno Phil Chorus, talk with Chris Morrison about the Reno Phil's “Mahler's Fifth Symphony” concerts, the final concerts of the orchestra's 2023-24 season, on April 20 and 21, 2024. The music includes the Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler as well as the Gloria by Francis Poulenc.

Klaus Mäkelä has been named Riccardo Muti's successor at the helm of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a role he assumes in 2027 alongside the post of Chief Conductor of Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Meanwhile, he remains committed to his two European orchestras, the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic.  Following his Decca debut recording, of the complete Sibelius symphonies in Oslo, Mäkelä has made two much-admired recordings of music commissioned by Serge Diaghilev. The first of these, made with the Orchestre de Paris, was released early last year – Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and the complete Firebird ballet – and James Jolly spoke to the conductor by Zoom back in February 2023 as Klaus was in Cleveland conducting performances of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Gramophone Podcasts are given in association with Wigmore Hall

Reno Phil music director and conductor Laura Jackson, composer Paul Novak, violin soloist Charlotte Marckx, and Tacie Moessner of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development speak with Chris Morrison about the Reno Phil's concerts "Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony" on February 24 and 25, 2024. The concerts include longing is an aviary by Paul Novak, the Violin Concerto No. 4 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and the Symphony No. 5 by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Sheku Kanneh-Mason, hailed by The New Yorker as “a cellist of blazing sensitivity,” makes his CSO debut in Elgar's rhapsodic Cello Concerto. Paavo Järvi conducts Nielsen's Fifth Symphony, a visceral, dramatic work exploring humanity's potential for conflict, born in the aftermath of World War I. Beethoven's jubilant hymn to liberty opens the program. Learn more: cso.org/performances/23-24/cso-classical/sheku-kanneh-mason-plays-elgar

For more than a year now, I've been obsessed with TÁR, the 2022 Todd Field film starring Cate Blanchett as an orchestral conductor whose power plays lead to her devastating downfall. Yes, the story is gripping and suspenseful, but it's the music interlaced throughout the film that keeps me coming back. Aside from the two works performed in the film — Mahler's Fifth Symphony and Elgar's Cello Concerto — which were baked into Field's script, the music you hear throughout TÁR is the result of months of work by the film's music supervisor, Lucy Bright. A specialist in the arenas of film and television scoring, Bright has worked with some of today's biggest composers — including Nico Muhly, Michael Nyman, and Volker Bertelmann — on projects ranging from Assassin's Creed to Aftersun and The Iron Claw. But what exactly does a music supervisor do on a film of this scale? Turns out, it's a lot.  From working with a team of on-set sound engineers who specialize in recording symphony orchestras to developing the film's Deutsche Grammophon concept album and recreating Urbie Green's 1967 recording of "Twenty-one Trombones," Bright was kept busy managing countless aspects of the film's musical atmosphere across three countries. In this episode of the Classical Post podcast, I speak with Bright about the expert levels of coordination and collaboration vital to her work, working with the Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir to realize Lydia Tár's compositions, and what it was like seeing Cate Blanchett raise a baton to conduct Mahler. Plus, she shares her fascinating history with modern architecture, her go-to burger place in New York City, and the therapeutic benefits of swimming in the natural springs of London's Hampstead Heath. Stream TÁR (Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture) on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, or wherever you stream music. - Classical Post® is created and produced by Gold Sound Media® LLC, a New York-based marketing agency for the performing arts industry. Explore how we can grow your audience to make a lasting impact in your community.

Via Wikipedia The Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, also known as the Fate Symphony (German: Schicksalssinfonie) is a symphony composed by Ludwig van Beethoven between 1804 and 1808. It is one of the best-known compositions in classical music and one of the most frequently played symphonies,[1] and it is widely considered one of the cornerstones of western music. First performed in Vienna's Theater an der Wien in 1808, the work achieved its prodigious reputation soon afterward. E. T. A. Hoffmann described the symphony as "one of the most important works of the time". As is typical of symphonies during the Classical period, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has four movements. It begins with a distinctive four-note "short-short-short-long" motif, often characterized as "fate knocking at the doorWestern.", the Schicksals-Motiv (fate motif): The symphony, and the four-note opening motif in particular, are known worldwide, with the motif appearing frequently in popular culture, from disco versions to rock and roll covers, to uses in film and television. Like Beethoven's Eroica (heroic) and Pastorale (rural), Symphony No. 5 was given an explicit name besides the numbering, though not by Beethoven himself. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musicspeaks-podcast/support

Via Wikipedia In general the symphony is sunny and cheerful, with light instrumentation that for some listeners recalls the symphonies of Joseph Haydn, with whom Beethoven had studied a decade before.[13] In a commentary on the symphony Grove comments that Haydn – who was still alive when the new symphony was first performed – might have found the work too strong for his taste.[2] The Fourth Symphony contrasts with Beethoven's style in the previous Third Symphony (Eroica), and has sometimes been overshadowed by its massive predecessor[n 4] and its fiery successor, the Fifth Symphony.[2] --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musicspeaks-podcast/support

Reno Phil Music Director and Conductor Laura Jackson talks with Chris Morrison about both the 2023-24 Reno Phil season, as well as the October 14 and 15, 2023 season-opening concerts featuring Richard Strauss's Don Juan and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Also, pianist Daniela Liebman talks about her career and the Piano Concerto by Clara Schumann she'll be playing with the Reno Phil at the October concerts.

From its commanding four-note opening to its blazing finish, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony remains the unrivaled expression of struggle and triumph in orchestral music. German baritone Christian Gerhaher, “the foremost art song singer of our time” (The New York Times), performs selections from Mahler's The Youth's Magic Horn. Inspired by Hindustani classical music, Nina Shekhar's shimmering Lumina explores the contrast of light and dark. Learn more: cso.org/performances/23-24/cso-classical/jaap-van-zweden-conducts-beethoven-5

SynopsisOn this date in 1973, Eugene Ormandy conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in music by Mozart, Brahms, and the American composer, Roy Harris. The program was nothing out of the ordinary, but the concert took place in Beijing and marked the FIRST time an American orchestra had performed in Communist China. The orchestra was invited to China following the famous visit of President and Mrs. Nixon and secretary of state Henry Kissinger.In the audience for one of these historic concerts was a young student of traditional Chinese music named Tan Dun. When Tan heard the Philadelphians perform Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, a work he had never heard before, he decided then and there to become a composer himself. In 1986, Tan Dun came to New York City, and since then has managed to combine elements of East and West into his own musical works.In 1987, for example, he composed a violin concerto titled Out of Peking Opera, which draws on both Chinese and European traditions. In addition to prestigious awards and commissions from major foundations and orchestras, in March of 2001, Tan Dun won an Oscar for his film score to the Ang Lee film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.Music Played in Today's ProgramLudwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827) Symphony No. 5 Royal Philharmonic; René Leibowitz, cond. Chesky 17Tan Dun (b. 1957) Out of Peking Opera Cho-Liang Lin, violin; Helsinki Philharmonic; Muhai Tang, cond. Ondine 864

At the Mzanzi National Philharmonic concert next Saturday at which the main work will be Mahler's Fifth Symphony conducted by Marin Alsop, the first half will feature dramatic soprano arias sung by Masabane Cecilia Rangwanashe who is based in Europe and who has been dazzling audiences with her radiant voice. She has just sung the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss at a Proms concert in London and works regularly with Antonio Pappano at the Royal Opera House. Masabane has given solo recitals at the Wigmore hall and has appeared in Washington, Hamburg, Dresden, Atlanta and Chicago. I managed to get her on a zoom connection for this week's People of Note.

SynopsisOn today's date in 1962, the Symphony No. 5 for strings, by the German-born American composer Gene Gutchë, received its premiere performance at Chatauqua, New York.Romeo Maximilian Eugene Ludwig Gutchë was born in Berlin in 1907. His father, a well-to-do European businessman, was not amused by the notion of his son “wasting” his time on music, even though the famous Berlin-based composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni confirmed the young man's talent. So “Gene” Gutchë ran away from home, abandoning any hope of a sizeable inheritance in the process, and came to America. He studied at the Universities of Minnesota and Iowa, and, in 1950, at age 43, produced his first symphony. Gutchë would go on to compose six symphonies in all, plus an hour-long symphonic work for chorus and orchestra titled “Akhenaten,” premiered by Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony in 1983. For most of his life, despite fellowships and commissions, Gutchë lived modestly with his wife, Marion, in a cottage in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.Gutchë died in the fall of 2001—one year after this Cincinnati Symphony recording of his Fifth Symphony was reissued on compact disc. Music Played in Today's ProgramGene Gutchë (1907 - 2001) Symphony No. 5, Op. 34 Cincinnati Symphony; Max Rudolf, conductor. CRI 825

Synopsis In wartime London, on today's date in 1943, a Promenade Concert featured the first performance of the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams. The composer himself conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Queen's Hall, the traditional home of the annual summertime Proms concerts, had been destroyed by German bombers two years earlier. The Proms concerts had moved into a new and larger venue, the Royal Albert Hall, where the series continues to this day. For the 1943 season, Proms programs started earlier than usual, so that concert goers could get home before the nightly air raids on the city. To London audiences troubled by war fears and many sleepless nights of German bombing, the serene musical world of the Vaughan Williams Fifth must have seemed a real blessing. It's not a "wartime" symphony in the conventional sense, full of defiance and bluster, but rather an evocation and affirmation of England's musical past, blending hints of 16th century hymn tunes and modal folk melodies into symphonic form. For some time, Vaughan Williams had been at work on an opera based on The Pilgrim's Progress, a 17th century allegorical tale by the Puritan writer John Bunyan. Some of the tunes and motives from his projected opera ended up in the symphony, along with a sense of faith and optimism in the face of adversity that must have deeply affected the first audience to hear the work. Music Played in Today's Program Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958) Symphony No. 5 London Philharmonic; Bernard Haitink, conductor. EMI 55487

Synopsis There is an ancient curse, popularly attributed to the Chinese, “May you live in interesting times!” The French composer Etienne-Nicolas Mehul, who was born on this date in 1763, certainly lived and worked in an “interesting” time, politically and musically speaking. His creative life spanned both the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, and since Mehul live and worked in Paris, he found himself at the epicenter of some extremely “interesting” events. As one of the leading French composers of his day, he was commissioned to write patriotic works for state occasions, and had friends and supporters in high places, including Napoleon himself. His operas, both dramatic and comic, were greatly admired by his contemporaries, although sometimes these proved too “politically incorrect” for the Parisian censors. Beethoven (not always “P-C” himself) was a Mehul fan and borrowed some striking theatrical effects from one of Mehul's operas to use in his own opera, Fidelio. Apparently this admiration – and the borrowing – was reciprocated. The last movement of Mehul's First Symphony (in g minor) shows the impact of Beethoven's dramatic Fifth Symphony (in c minor) of a few years earlier. Music Played in Today's Program Étienne-Nicolas Méhul (1763 - 1817) Symphony No. 1 Les Musiciens du Louvre; Marc Minkowski, conductor. Erato 45026

Rebecca Miller and I seemed to instantly hit it off and we tended to agree on a lot of topics - a very enjoyable interview to make. We discussed why we both enjoy conducting youth orchestras and how important playing in orchestras is for a young person, we also chatted about the positives and negatives of preparing an orchestra for another conductor, and I heard a fabulous story about Sir Georg Solti conducting the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony! If you want to hear the bonus mini-episode attached to this episode, why not subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/amiconthepodium, and, for a monthly fee starting from just £5 a month, you can access two new series of interviews, group Zoom meetings with other fans of the podcast and myself, a monthly bulletin about the podcast and my own career as well as articles, photos, videos and even conducting lessons from myself. If you listen via Apple podcasts, please do leave a rating and review - it really helps the podcast get noticed and attract more listeners. If you want to get involved on social media, you can via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/amiconthepodium) or Twitter (@amiconthepodium). This interview was recorded on 13th December 2022 via Zoom.

My guest today is the American creator of one of 2022's funniest games. In Trombone Champ, you play as a trombonist and must blast your way through a setlist of classical pieces, national anthems, and traditional songs in a brilliant and riotously silly reinterpretation of Guitar Hero. After a journalist for PC Gamer posted a video of himself ruining Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in the game last year, Trombone Champ became a viral sensation, propelling my guest and his wife collaborator into the spotlight. Colleen Wheeler of the International Trombone Association told the Guardian: “It is abundantly clear that this is the finest video game ever created.” Riding high on that success, my guest and his wife recently made a webgame to promote Gabrielle Zevin's smash hit novel ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow'. “I don't know why there's not more comedy in games,” he once said. “Because games can be so funny.” Welcome Dan Vecchitto.Clips under discussion:At Doom's Gate (Robert Prince).Damn Puzzle (Nathan Wang).Intro (Glenn Stafford).Results (Bjørn Lynne).All other music by Simon Parkin Thank you for listening to My Perfect Console. Please consider becoming a supporter; your small monthly donation will help to make the podcast sustainable for the long term, contributing toward the cost of equipment, editing, and hosting episodes. https://plus.acast.com/s/my-perfect-console. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On December 7, 1842, a group of musicians gathered in the Apollo Rooms in Lower Manhattan and performed – for the first time – as the Philharmonic Society of New York. The first piece they played? Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In this episode, we try to listen to that most famous of famous symphonies as our 1842 audience would have: as if for the very first time. And, host Jamie Bernstein follows the twists and turns on the journey an early musician, Solidor Milon, took to get to that stage. Even today, the path that NY Phil musicians take to Lincoln Center is a breathtaking one, as we hear in the story of concertmaster Frank Huang.A transcript of this episode is available on our website: nyphilstory.com

Robert Powell is one of our best-known actors, with a career that began in the late sixties and exploded into almost instant fame; since then, there have been some fifty films, including “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “The Italian Job”, numerous theatre roles, and television appearances which have included six years on Holby City. For many people, though, he will always be Gustav Mahler thanks to Ken Russell's 1973 biopic; for some, he became a memorable representation of Jesus Christ, thanks to his starring role in Zeffirelli's six-hour epic. Robert Powell begins by choosing Mahler's famous Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony. He listened to Mahler non-stop when rehearsing for the role, but was still surprised by some of the eccentric things Ken Russell asked him to do: he will never forget floating for hours in a freezing lake. He talks about the impact of early fame, conjuring up the excitement of the King's Road in the “swinging sixties”, and meeting his wife, Babs, who danced with Pan's People. And he tells the story of how, when he was playing Jesus, he delivered the Sermon on the Mount and “something really extraordinary happened”. These days he is a devoted grandfather, making up for the time he couldn't spend with his family when he was away filming. Other music choices include Stravinsky, Bach, Janacek, and his hero Bob Dylan. A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Synopsis It's all a matter of timing.  In 1942, the Soviet Union was America's wartime ally, and the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich made the cover of TIME magazine.  Seven years later, the war was over, but the Cold War was on – with a vengeance. On March 25, 1949, Shostakovich arrived in New York for his first visit to America as part of the Soviet delegation to a “Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace.” By then the anti-Communist tide of American public opinion resulted in pickets and protests.  Those who spoke at the congress, including the American composer Aaron Copland, felt compelled to preface their comments with unambiguously anti-Communist manifestos. Shostakovich nervously read the equally unambiguous speech prepared for him by his Soviet minders, attacking American imperialism in general and the expatriate Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, in particular.  It was embarrassing for everyone concerned. But while he was in New York, Shostakovich got to play a piano reduction of the Scherzo from his Fifth Symphony for a huge crowd at Madison Square Garden.  That, at least, resulted in a big ovation – and maybe that was how he privately approached the whole, sad affair – as a kind of grim scherzo, or joke. Music Played in Today's Program Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975) Symphony No. 5 USSR Cultural Ministry Symphony; Gennady Rozhdestvensky, conductor. MCA 32128

Klaus Mäkelä's second recording for Decca finds him at the helm of his French orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris. They recorded Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and the complete Firebird ballet. James Jolly spoke to the conductor by Zoom when Klaus was in Cleveland conducting performances of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Gramophone Podcasts are given in association with Wigmore Hall

The Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare was appointed Music Director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (Montreal SO) at the start of the 2022-23 season and one of their first projects together, Mahler's Fifth Symphony, has just been released by Pentatone. Rafael Payare was in London recently conducting a run of much-praised performances of Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia at Covent Garden, and Gramophone's James Jolly took the opportunity to catch up with him to talk about his work in Montreal and the new Mahler recording. Gramophone Podcasts are given in association with Wigmore Hall.

Synopsis Two interesting symphonies had their premieres on today's date just eight years apart. Oddly enough, they were composed nearly ninety years apart. The first was the Symphony in C by George Bizet, written in 1855 when the composer was only 17. It was mislaid in his papers, ignored by Bizet himself as a naive youthful exercise, and not revived until 1935. It was performed for the first time on the 26th of February that year in Basel, Switzerland under the baton of Felix Weingartner, who found a copy of the score that had been kept in the Paris Conservatory. The other work that premiered today was the Fifth Symphony of the American composer Roy Harris. It was written in 1942, during the Second World War, and was reportedly inspired by reports of heroic resistance by the Soviet Union to the Nazi invasion. Harris dedicated this symphony to the Red Army in honor of its 25th anniversary. The first performance—given by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony on February 26th, 1943—was broadcast via short wave to the Soviet Union. Ironically, despite Harris's unquestionable credentials as a loyal American and enthusiastic patriot, his pro-Soviet Symphony No. 5 was to become something of an embarrassment when our one-time Soviet allies became Public Enemy No. 1 during the long Cold War period that followed the end of the Second World War. Music Played in Today's Program Georges Bizet (1823 - 1892) Symphony No. 1 in C ORTF Orchestra; Jean Martinon, conductor. DG 437 371 Roy Harris (1899 - 1979) Symphony No. 5 Louisville Orchestra; Robert Whitney, conductor. Albany 012

In his Fifth Symphony, Mahler embraces all aspects of life. After a tumultuous funeral march, the work's five movements include folk-inspired dances, a tender love song and a boisterous finale. Noted for his "great affinity with Mahler" (Le Monde), Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä pairs the composer's Fifth Symphony with the U.S. premiere of Aino by Peruvian American composer Jimmy López Bellido. Explore the music in the free preconcert conversation featuring Steve Rings in Orchestra Hall 75 minutes before the performance. The conversation will last approximately 30 minutes. No additional tickets are needed. Learn more: cso.org/performances/22-23/cso-classical/makela-conducts-lopez-and-mahler-5

Have you ever wondered why classical music always seems to be performed too fast in the concert halls? Wonder no more. Wim Winters, an organist and pianist from Belgium, challenges modern performance practice of Beethoven, Chopin and others from the Classical period via his controversial YouTube channel Authentic Sound. Winters' point is simple: the metronome indications of works by the likes of Beethoven have been misread for more than a century, a claim made evident by historical proof that the current tempi is up to twice as fast as the original (!) Pianists today need physiotherapy in their attempts to follow painstaking speeds and even the fastest fall short. Among Winters' numerous reconstructions are Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Moonlight Sonata, at first appearing shockingly slow. But on closer inspection, could it be that only a return to the original tempi will release the true emotional potential of the Western musical canon?

Synopsis If ever there was a red-letter day in American music, November 14th must surely be it. For starters, it's the birthday of Aaron Copland, who was born in New York City on today's date in 1900—and then there's all that happened on November 14th in the life of Leonard Bernstein. Here's how Bernstein himself explained it: “I never forget a Copland birthday. Two of the most important events of my life happened on November 14—the first in 1937 when Aaron and I met for the first time… Now, I worried and complained terrifically back then and always took my troubles to Aaron, who would tell me to 'stop whining.' He seemed to have such complete confidence in me that he didn't show a bit of surprise when on Sunday, November 14, 1943, I made a dramatic success by filling in for the ailing Bruno Walter and conducting the New York Philharmonic. All Aaron's predications came true—and on his birthday!” As if that weren't enough, in 1954, again on Copland's birthday, Bernstein made his TV debut presenting Beethoven's draft sketches for the opening of his Fifth Symphony. It proved a smash success—and led to Bernstein's televised Young Person's Concerts that brought classical music to millions of Americans coast to coast. Music Played in Today's Program Aaron Copland (1900-1990) Piano Blues No. 3 James Tocco, piano MPR 201

A portrait of a creative genius, a conductor and composer played by Cate Blanchett, explores the dark and unacknowledged heartlessness behind the vigor and prestige of a famous artist. Tár is the name of a new film written and directed by Todd Field. The main character, Lydia Tár, is a prominent American classical music conductor and composer, played by Cate Blanchett. We meet her at the height of her career, after heading several world-class orchestras, now the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, arguably the most prestigious position in the symphonic world. The film opens with her being interviewed at a New York film festival, where the brilliance of her intellect shines freely, discussing conducting in general, and her upcoming recording of Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Behind Tár's smooth and articulate presentation, there is a hint of something else, and I think it's deliberate: smug condescension. Perhaps the supreme self-confidence of such a person will inevitably cast this shadow. Lydia is a fictional character, of course, but Field has created an extraordinary and multifaceted personality for Blanchett to bring to life. It's all very well to indicate that your heroine is in fact a genius. It's quite another to write a character who makes you really believe it. Lydia's talk is so sophisticated that we can truly admire, while at the same smile a little at the ironic touches the director adds to the portrait, the will of steel underneath the suave exterior, the strongly held convictions that drive every aesthetic statement, every literary allusion. The film presents us with a convincingly brilliant artist. But of course the writing depends on the performer for its realization. Field had in mind Cate Blanchett, one of our best living film actors, from the beginning. Lydia has an extremely busy and complicated life. On the personal side, she is openly lesbian, living with her partner Sharon, the orchestra's head violinist, played by the great Nina Hoss, with whom she has adopted a girl. We see her as a teacher, outspoken and even ruthless in her attitude towards what she sees as the timidity of some of her students. We see her as the super-efficient manager of her own career, so competent and controlling that she intimidates even those who work closest with her. The extraordinary thing is that in the midst of all this, we are made to suspect intuitively that there is a kind of emptiness at work, a big impressive show without a center. Todd Field knows that classical tragedy portrays the fatal defects of larger-than-life figures. His screenplay and direction achieve a novelistic density, so that when events start to go wrong, it's not really about hubris, but about a host of uncomfortable questions concerning artists and the needs that drive artistic creation, about the self-seeking that dominates people, about passion and its discontents. Lydia has apparently had a habit of picking out female musicians to fall in and out of love with, brief infatuations and affairs. One of these young women angered her when they broke up, and instead of letting the matter go, Lydia decided to make sure that this poor girl would be blacklisted from getting a job in any orchestra. This is the start of things unraveling, but there are depths and shadows here that are more significant than just this one transgression, and they are slowly revealed. Blanchett appears in a lot of genre pieces, as any steadily working Hollywood actress has to do, but here once more she is given the chance at something great, and she takes it even further than we expect. The musical sequences are stunning. Tár is a film of lavish beauty and desolating insight.  

A journey from brooding despair to rousing triumph, Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony rescued him from the grips of official Soviet disfavor. But to many listeners, it's a more subversive critique of life under Stalin. This program, led by Manfred Honeck, also showcases the U.S. premiere of Lera Auerbach's Diary of a Madman, composed for and performed by Gautier Capuçon. Ticket holders are invited to a free preconcert conversation featuring Laura Sauer-Shah in Orchestra Hall 75 minutes before the performance. The conversation will last approximately 30 minutes. No additional tickets required. Learn more: cso.org/performances/22-23/cso-classical/honeck-capucon-and-shostakovich-5

Cate Blanchett can be heard on the album conducting rehearsals of Mahler's Fifth Symphony (as Lydia Tár) with great skill. She describes her collaboration with the Dresdner Philharmonie and its concertmaster Wolfgang Hentrich as “a great, and life-changing, privilege”. “How truly blessed I am,” adds Blanchett, “to have my name appear anywhere near this ridiculously talented assembly of musicians.” Her skill as a pianist is on evidence here too, as she performs a Prelude from Bach's Well-tempered Clavier as part of one of Lydia's teaching sessions. Purchase the music (without talk) at:Inspired by the movie TAR (classicalmusicdiscoveries.store)Your purchase helps to support our show! Classical Music Discoveries is sponsored by La Musica International Chamber Music Festival and Uber. @CMDHedgecock#ClassicalMusicDiscoveries #KeepClassicalMusicAlive#LaMusicaFestival #CMDGrandOperaCompanyofVenice #CMDParisPhilharmonicinOrléans#CMDGermanOperaCompanyofBerlin#CMDGrandOperaCompanyofBarcelonaSpain#ClassicalMusicLivesOn#Uber Please consider supporting our show, thank you!Donate (classicalmusicdiscoveries.store) staff@classicalmusicdiscoveries.comThis album is broadcasted with the permission of Crossover Media Music Promotion (Zachary Swanson and Amanda Bloom).  

Join us as Maestro Couturiaux chats with RSO's concertmaster Elisabeth Adkins and principal violist Susan Dubois about the upcoming November 5th concert featuring pieces by London-born composer Anna Clyne, Mozart's most masterful example of a hybrid symphony plus concerto, and concluding with the most famous opening notes in all of classical music when the orchestra performs Beethoven's exhilarating and monumental Fifth Symphony.

We welcome concert pianist, conductor, professor, food and wine aficionado and all-around bon vivant Awadagin Pratt for a backstage discussion about his appearance with the Toledo Symphony. Awadagin brings a new work by Jessie Montgomery to the Peristyle, alongside two works that pay tribute to Music Director Alain Trudel and his five years at the helm of the TSO: Beethoven's iconic Fifth Symphony and Schubert's miraculous Symphony No. 8, the "Unfinished" Symphony.

Synopsis On this day in 1904, in Cologne, Germany, Gustav Mahler conducted the first performance of his Fifth Symphony. It was not a success. Applause was light, with loud hissing from some in the audience. Even Mahler's wife, Alma, complained so much about the orchestration that Mahler kept tinkering with the score until the last year of his life. Despite this inauspicious beginning, Mahler's Fifth has become a popular showpiece for virtuoso orchestras and its slow movement, marked Adagietto -- supposedly Mahler's musical love to Alma -- has become one of Mahler's best-loved pieces. The American composer Jerome Moross also had a symphony premiered on today's date. The year was 1943, Moross was 30 years old, and Sir Thomas Beecham conducted its premiere performance with the Seattle Symphony. Unlike Mahler, Moross wrote only ONE symphony, and the American hobo tune inspired the slow movement of his “The Midnight Special.” Jerome Moross is best known his work in Hollywood. His 1958 score for “The Big Country” was nominated for an Academy Award. Moross also wrote the music for “Wagon Train,” a popular TV Western. As Moross once said: “a composer must reflect his landscape and mine is the landscape of America. I don't do it consciously, it is simply the only way I can write.” Music Played in Today's Program Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) Symphony No. 5 Chicago Symphony; Claudio Abbado, cond. DG 427 254 Jerome Moross (1913-1983) Symphony No. 1 London Symphony; JoAnn Falletta, cond. Koch 7188

As Great Britain endured the Blitz in 1943, the 71-year-old Vaughan Williams produced his Fifth Symphony. To celebrate 150 years since the composer's birth, Edward Gardner conducts this work of warmth and gentle contemplation. Christian Tetzlaff, “a meticulous and refined virtuoso” (The New York Times), presents Bartók's rhapsodic Second Violin Concerto. Wagner's serene and somber prelude to Act 3 of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opens the program. Ticket holders are invited to a free preconcert conversation featuring Steve Rings in Orchestra Hall 75 minutes before the performance. The conversation will last approximately 30 minutes. No additional tickets required. Classic Encounter Thursday, November 3: Preconcert lecture hosted by Chicago's favorite radio DJ, WXRT's Terri Hemmert, with co-host and CSO viola Max Raimi. You will have the opportunity to add Classic Encounter to your order after selecting your seats for the concert. Learn more: cso.org/performances/22-23/cso-classical/wagner-bartok-and-vaughan-williams

The 2022/23 season will mark 70 years since Sergei Prokofiev's death. Riccardo Muti conducts Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony, composed in 1944, which ranks among his greatest achievements. Mozart's Symphony No. 39 has grandeur and intensity that foreshadows the mature symphonies of Beethoven. The overture to Rossini's Journey to Reims gathers several of the composer's buoyant and picturesque themes. Ticket holders are invited to a free preconcert conversation featuring Daniel Schlosberg in Orchestra Hall 75 minutes before the performance. The conversation will last approximately 30 minutes. No additional tickets required. Learn more: cso.org/performances/22-23/cso-classical/muti-conducts-mozart-and-prokofiev

The Johnstown Symphony Orchestra's Music Director James Blachly joins Jim Cunningham to discuss their concert at the Johnstown airport June 26 with music made famous by Jefferson Airplane, Gonna Fly Now from the film Rocky, music from Top Gun and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony along with a word about upcoming events for the Fourth of July and the fall season along with thoughts about the visit by organist Paul Jacobs to play the Saint Saens Organ symphony in the Spring season.

A generation after King Cyrus had let the Jews back into Israel, the Temple still had not been rebuilt. Sometimes, tasks seem so gargantuan that we do not know where to start, causing us to never start at all. When Beethoven wrote the Fifth Symphony, all he needed was four notes to get going. And to practice yoga, the hardest move is the one onto your mat.

We take our cue from the TSO's Masterworks series concert Tchaikovsky's Fifth, which features, well, Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. The concert marks a return to Toledo for the conductor Giordano Bellincampi, and star violinist Benjamin Beilman (who plays the concerto by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor on the concert) joins us by phone for a getting-to-know-you session (including a Twitter smackdown quiz!).

Jess Gillam and cellist Edgar Moreau share some of the music they love, with shimmering piano pieces by Debussy and Rachmaninov, and epic emotion from Serge Reggiani and Dusty Springfield. Abdullah Ibrahim is playing the soprano saxophone and Edgar takes us back to his very first orchestral experience with Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Playlist: Debussy - Suite bergamasque for piano: Clair de lune Jean-Yves Thibaudet (piano) Offenbach - Harmonies des bois, Op. 76; No. 3 Les Larmes de Jacqueline Mischa Maisky (cello), Dania Hovora (piano) Abdullah Ibrahim - Ishmael Abdullah Ibrahim (soprano saxophone), Cecil McBee (double bass), Roy Brooks (drums) Serge Reggiani - Ma fille Bremer/McCoy - Ordet Rachmaninov - Suite No 1 op 5 Fantaisie Tableaux, Barcarolle Martha Argerich, Alexandre Rabinovitch (piano) Dusty Springfield – You Don't Have to Say You Love Me Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64; II. Andante cantabile… Berliner Philharmoniker, Kirill Petrenko

We take our cue from the TSO's Masterworks series concert Tchaikovsky's Fifth, which features, well, Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. The concert marks a return to Toledo for the conductor Giordano Bellincampi, and star violinist Benjamin Beilman (who plays the concerto by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor on the concert) joins us by phone for a getting-to-know-you session (including a Twitter smackdown quiz!).

Deanna and Chris chat about their Thanksgiving festivities, how the kids are coming over for Kidsgiving, the fact that Chris loves decorating the outside of the house for the holidays, and how Deanna's sleep schedule is way off these days. Then Chris talks about how the music in our lives can have a profound effect on our physical and mental state. He quizzes Deanna on well-known songs (that almost cause her "ugly laugh" to come out) before taking us all on a journey to Budapest, Hungary. After sightseeing around the city, they attend an amazing event at the Mupa Budapest Concert Hall to see the Danubia Orchestra perform Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. This performance is a very special one for very special people. It's an event where the attendees and the musicians become one with the music and where everyone is truly able to EXPERIENCE THE POWER.THE GOOD ALL AROUND US podcast is a celebration of uplifting stories and events from around the world.Each week, hosts Deanna and Chris Ley will alternate telling stories of good things that have happened to real people all across the globe.It's time to celebrate THE GOOD ALL AROUND US!It's time to HAPPY UP YOUR LIFE!Please make sure to subscribe so you can stay up to date on all new podcast releases....and if you like us, please give a 5-star rating in Apple Podcast or Podchaser. It will only take a sec! We'd appreciate it!...and if you really, really like us, head on over to Patreon and become our Neighbor! By joining our Patreon Community at the link below, you can get some fun GOODies, including access to our private Facebook group, monthly bonus episodes, and other awesome stuff. Best of all, you will be our Neighbor! You can move right in to the GOOD 'HOOD by clicking here.Be sure to follow us on social media!It's where we share about all the goings-on here at THE GOOD ALL AROUND US podcast.Facebook at THE GOOD ALL AROUND USInstagram at @TheGoodAllAroundUsPodcastTwitter at @HappyUpYourLifeYouTube at THE GOOD ALL AROUND US PodcastLinkedIn at THE GOOD ALL AROUND US PodcastGet your GOOD GOOD Merch!Grab some fun (and funny) gear at the Get GOOD Merch Store.Access everything above and so much more in one easy place - our website!www.TheGoodAllAroundUs.comJoin our Facebook group PODAPALOOZA where podcast creators and podcast listeners unite!Email us at any time at Hello@TheGoodAllAroundUs.com! We'd love to hear from you! Music courtesy of the amazingly talented Timur Khakimov. Check him out at OCHTAHEDRONMUSIC.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/thegoodallaroundus)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Perfect Score, a classical music podcast! Today I will be covering one of my most favourite works ever, Mahler's Fifth Symphony! Click here

Nina Kraus, a professor of communication sciences, neurobiology, and physiology at Northwestern University in Chicago, has done a lot of research on the effect of playing music on processing sound, learning, and brain development. She explains the “musician’s advantage,” which includes better reading skills, and how music training can be a tool to improve the performance of students from low socio-economic backgrounds. *This episode was originally released on June 10, 2020.* Intro (00:01): Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. Richard Miles (00:39): The sound of music, not just a movie about seeing Austrians, but also a fertile field of research, specifically the effect of playing music on processing sound, learning, and brain development. I’m your host Richard Miles. Today my guest is Nina Kraus, a professor of communication, sciences, neurobiology, and physiology at Northwestern University in Chicago. Welcome to Radio Cade, Nina. Nina Kraus (01:02): I’m so glad to be here. Richard Miles (01:03): So Nina, you’re one of those difficult guests that you have done so much, and we could talk a lot, but then this would not be a 30 minute podcast, it would be like a 30 hour podcast, but I have heard you speak before, and I know you were actually quite good about summarizing your research so I know you’re up to the challenge, but I’d like to start out by focusing on one particular area of your work. You’ve done a lot in sound processing and how the brain processes sound, but why don’t we start with some basic definitions for our listeners. So from a scientific perspective or researchers perspective, what is the relationship or the difference, I guess, between music, noise, and language. What’s the relationship between those three things? Nina Kraus (01:41): What a great starting question. So sound is the common denominator for all the things that you mentioned and sound is a very under-recognized force in our society. It is very, very powerful, and yet we don’t pay very much attention to it because it’s invisible, first of all, like a lot of powerful forces like gravity. So you don’t think about it. And we live in a very visually biased world. And even scientifically there was a National Institute for Vision 13 years before there was one for hearing. And that was the National Institute for Deafness and Communication. We share that with smell and taste, but all of the things that you mentioned, language, and, music, and noise, these are all sounds. And I’m a biologist and I am interested in sound and the brain. And so really the overall umbrella over everything that we study is sound and brain. How do we make sense of sound? How is sound processed in the brain and how does our experience with sound shape how we perceive the world? Richard Miles (02:52): I saw on one of your papers, you have a specific way or methodology that you can actually look at brain as it is interpreting sound, right? Nina Kraus (03:01): Yeah. Let me tell you a little bit about that. Initially, as a biologist, I came into science studying single neurons, actually, single neurons with scalp electrodes and animal models and one of my first experiments was to play sound to an animal while I was recording the brain’s response, the one cell’s response, to that sound. This was a rabbit, a bunny rabbit, and we taught the rabbit that the sound had a meaning that every time the sound happened, he’d get some food. So the same sound, same neuron, but the neurons response to that sound changed. And so we could see firsthand learning, the biology of learning, and that’s something that I’m deeply interested in. My lab, which we call Brain Volts has been looking at how our experience with sound shapes our nervous system, but I was coming from the specificity of recording from individual cells. And so these are signals. These are tangible signals that you can really define, and that felt good. And so the question was, well, how can we get a way of measuring sound processing in the brain in humans when we can’t go sticking needles into individual cells? You know, there are many ways of recording the brain’s response to sound with scalp electrodes. And of course, as I’m talking to you, now, the nerves in your brain that respond to sound are producing electricity. And so with the scalp electrodes, we can pick up that electricity and that’s been done for a long, long time, but most of the measures that we can obtain from the scalp are rather blunt with respect to what I’m interested in, which is the different ingredients of sound. So sound consists, again let me make a visual object comparison. So with vision, everybody knows that a given object has a shape, a size, a color, a texture, that’s all very obvious, but people don’t realize, first of all, that there is sound and secondly, that sound also consists of ingredients like pitch, how high or low a tambour, a violin and a tuba sound different when they’re playing the same note, that’s tambour. The harmonics that differentiate one speech sound from another. There’s phase that tells us where objects are in space, based on the time of arrival of the sound to your two ears. And there’s a huge timing. So the auditory system is our fastest sense, even though light is faster than sound processing sound happens on the order of microseconds because there’s so much timing information in sound. That’s how sound works, it’s fleeting. And so, what I was interested, what I am interested in is how do we figure out how the brain makes sense of these different ingredients? And we figured out a way of doing this because most of the methods that were available to us in the past, you could just see is the response large, is the response fast to sound, but I want to know how does your brain respond specifically to pitch and timing and tambour and phase all these different ingredients. And so one of the metaphors that I like to use is a mixing board. So if you think about the faders on a mixing board and you think of all the different ingredients and sound, when they are transduced into the signals of the brain, which is electricity, it doesn’t work like a volume knob. People, even musicians, are not good at processing all the sounds like a volume knob. They have specific strengths and weaknesses like the faders on a mixing board and I wanted a biological approach that would be able to look at that, would be very, very precise, and not only be able to tell us well, what is the effect of playing a musical instrument for many years? What is the effect of speaking another language, but not only looking at these group differences, but what about individuals? I mean, my auditory brain is different from your auditory brain, we’re all individuals. And so would it be possible to actually have a physiologic response that reflected these ingredients, A-of-all, and B-of-all would not only reflect what happens with experience in groups of people, but even on an individual basis. And we have really figured this out. So this is a response called the ‘frequency following response’ the FFR, which we have adapted to our use and we are able to use very complex, sounds like speech and music and analyze the responses in a way to see how an individual processes these different ingredients. And we’ve spent a lot of time on the methodology. So we have two tutorials on the frequency following response, which really speaks about these responses in a lot of detail. We have a number of patents on what we’ve discovered in terms of how to measure these responses. So this is really something that has kept us busy. So on the one hand, it was really a quest to search for a biological approach, which I’m really happy with now. And then it is a matter of applying that biological approach. Partly it was synergistic because we wanted to see, well, is this approach actually yielding the kind of information we want through research. And so we’ve done a lot of research and now we can really have confidence that a person’s response to sound really does reflect how their brain processes the different ingredients, how it might’ve been affected by the songs we sing, the languages we speak, and even your brain health, because making sense of sound is one of the hardest jobs that we ask our brains to do. So you can imagine that if you get hit in the head, it will disrupt this very, very fine microsecond level processing, which is one of the areas that we’re interested in looking at is, is what happens with head injury, especially with concussion, sports induced concussion. And so again, we can do that as well. Richard Miles (08:56): So on your website, I think you have this great graphical representation of the frequency following response, right? Where you will play a snippet of almost anything, but let’s say a piece of music and in the brain of the person listening to it, you have almost a mirror image right, of that same frequency. And you can see differences in the ability of the person to process what they’re hearing. And so you found, and again, I may have this wrong, you found that musicians had several advantages in the way that you will play for them something say Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and a musician will hear it differently than when you say musician, it’s someone who actually plays an instrument, right? Not just a music appreciator, or someone who plays an instrument. Those people process the sound differently than those people who are not trained in playing music. Is that correct? Nina Kraus (09:55): That’s exactly right. Because what is so beautiful about this biological approach is that the response we get from the brain, the electricity actually physically resembles the sound that was used to evoke it. This hardly ever happens in biological systems. I mean, usually you’re looking at something very abstract, like lipid levels, cholesterol levels, to give you some index of cardiovascular health. Then, to actually be able to say, Oh, well, people process sounds in a way that we can actually see with a certain transparency. So the transparency is, as you said, is such that we play a sound wave and you can see the sound wave and you can then deliver that sound, wave to a person and pick up the electricity that the sound wave generates. And then, you know, we’re all familiar with taking a sound wave and feeding it through a microphone, and then you can play it through a speaker. And then the same way, you can take an electrical response that you have recorded from the brain, it’s just an electrical response, and you can deliver that to a speaker and play it so we can both see and hear a person’s response to sound. And yes, in fact, we can see the people who regularly play an instrument, so I’m not talking about professional musicians. I’m just talking about people who regularly play a musical instrument, you know, as little as half an hour, twice a week on a regular basis. And one of the things that we’ve been able to find is that there really is a neural signature for the musician. So remember I said, that sound consisted of these ingredients like pitch and timing and tambour. And what we see as the musician strength is a strengthening of the harmonics in sound and of various timing ingredients. And it turns out that both the harmonics and the timing are not only important in music, but they also overlap with what you need for language. So you can imagine how if you are doing an activity that is strengthening your brain’s response to the harmonics, which not only are important for playing a musical instrument, the harmonics are what distinguish B’s and P’s, and D’s, and G’s from each other. So these are the same signals. They’re the same ingredients. They’re these beautiful signals outside the head and inside the head that we can see, how does experience shape how we perceive the world. So the musician signature really has a strengthening of harmonics and timing, which it turns out transfers to language abilities and language abilities, including things like reading and being able to hear speech in a noisy place like a classroom, being able to figure out what’s going on in a complex soundscape. So these are advantages that seem to come along with the brains increased stability, strengthened ability to process these particular ingredients of harmonics and timing and what we call FM sweeps, which are basically the simplest FM suites. It’s a change of frequency over time. It’s like a cat call, right? It’s a sweep up and down. And it turns out that speech sounds have very, very, very fast FM sweeps that distinguishes one consonant from another, that happened in a very, very short period of time. And so the brain’s ability to process these FM sweeps is something that we see as a strength in musicians, and is very much an important ingredient in language. Richard Miles (13:32): I find all of this fascinating Nina. I remember the one example that you gave you tested musician’s ability to, as you said, pick out a particular sound in a crowded room, and you compare that to non-musicians and that the musicians had this definitive ability to recognize a sound pattern and all that. And then of course, different types of syllables or consonant, they also had that ability. The only time I can ever do this, I’m not a musician is if we’re at a party, I can hear Phoebe’s voice in a crowded room, and then she said, well, yes, that’s because research has found that men interpret women’s voices like music. So finally, I have a researcher. You tell me, is that true or not? Nina Kraus (14:08): Well, I would say that you have had a lot of experience with Phoebe’s voice and so you’re sonic brain is tuned to that voice. And we say this, when, you know, you pick up the phone, your son calls you and you say, “Oh, it’s so good to hear the sound of your voice”, the years of the sound to meaning, sound to emotion connections that you’ve made with that voice even before you hear the particular words, you have this very strong connection to what you’ve learned. And so I think that’s why you can hear Phoebe so well. Richard Miles (14:41): Let’s talk some more about work that you have done, very interesting work, with something called The Harmony Project in Los Angeles. This is something, I think in 2014 was the research, and essentially you worked with an organization in Los Angeles, it was giving music lessons, I think mostly stringed instruments, right? They’re giving them lessons for a substantial amount of time and then you started tracking them doing assessments to see if there were other advantages, right, that translated not just the ability to play a given instrument, but also the ability to do other cognitive skills. Tell us a little bit more about that. Nina Kraus (15:14): So, we’re really fortunate as scientists, and also if you read about Brain Volts and what we care about in our lab. We really are interested in sound in the world and we’re less interested in creating an experiment in the lab where people come in and they are given a certain amount of training with sound. We’re really interested in what is the impact of playing a musical instrument in actual music programs that live in the world? Also, one of the questions that one often asks is, well, is it that the brains strengthened response in musicians is just something they were born with so that if you have a strength in a certain domain, you might be encouraged to pursue that activity. A way of, of trying to understand what the effect of experiences is to do a so-called longitudinal study. Let me tell you the long in longitudinal is no joke, because that means tracking the same individuals year after year after year. So, we had the opportunity to do this in Los Angeles in the gang reduction zones of LA. And also we had a companion project at the same time in the Chicago Public Schools, where we basically had the same experimental design, which consisted of you take two groups of people and you match them at the beginning of training, or before training has started, and you match them on age and sex and reading scores and IQ and everything that you can think of, and then one group gets music and another group gets something else and you track them over time. So you track them year after year. And we were able to do this in LA with elementary school kids, second, third, and fourth graders. So we did this over three years and then the project in Chicago was adolescents also in low income areas. We’ve tracked the adolescents from freshman year until they graduated as seniors. And what was important is that the individuals in the different groups were in the same classroom, same teachers, same socioeconomic areas. And we could see, well, what happens if one group gets music and another group gets something else? So what we were able to find was, first of all, we were very interested in, well, we already knew from cross sectional studies across the, about this musician signature that I told you about that musicians had strengthened responses to FM sweeps, to harmonics, to timing in speech. The musicians had these stronger responses, but we wanted to know, well, is this something that develops over time? And in both studies after a year of regular music making in LA, these were after-school programs five times a week. If you also include Saturday and in the Chicago public schools, it was actually within the school day so that they had an hour every day of music, just like you had an hour of English and Math and History. We’d measure sound processing in the brain using our biological approach at the beginning of the year. And then at again at the end of the year, and after a year in both studies, we found no change in the brain’s response to sound. And that’s what the data showed but we kept going. And so in both of the studies, what we found was that it takes a while to change the brain. And that’s a good thing. If your brain was changing in a fundamental way, every second, you’d be really confused, but you speak a certain language that has certain sound ingredients after a while. And it’s really after years of speaking of particular language, your brain automatically changes and changes in a way fundamental or your default experience of the world. I mean, even if you’re asleep and I’m measuring your brain’s response to sound, you will have this heightened response to certain sound ingredients, because it has just become a fundamental way of how you perceive the world. But this takes, while it really did take two years to see these changes. And at the same time, of course, we were interested well, are these kids doing better in school in various ways, in terms of literacy, for example, and being able to hear speech and noise. And in fact, again, we were able to, to track the changes in the brain with these gains in literacy, and in being able to hear, for example, speech in noise, Richard Miles (19:52): So Nina, it’s fairly common observation that the younger you are the easier it seems to do things like learn languages, foreign language, play instruments, and so on. Is there anything in your research or other people’s research that indicates are there definitive windows of neuroplasticity past which it’s not really worth it or the returns are so diminishing that every 10 hours of effort you put into it is really not going to get you much. Do you find that there’s a cutoff? Does it happen in elementary school or middle school? Or can you go on up through your twenties and still reasonably hope to take up an instrument or learn a foreign language and accomplish a very high degree of proficiency with it. Nina Kraus (20:28): Great question, the answer is no, there is no limit. Certainly the way that a young brain learns is different from an older brain, but we continue to learn until the day we die. And in fact, there’ve been very beautiful experiments in auditory learning in animal models where you can very easily and in a very precise way, regulate an animal’s experience at different ages and see how their brain responds to learning an auditory task. And there have been experiments showing that certainly animals will learn differently when they’re younger and when they’re older, but they will continue to learn until the end of their lives. And this is born out in human studies as well, specifically with music. So in our own experience, in the harmony project, the kids were elementary school kids, in high school, the kids just began their music instruction as freshmen. So what was kind of a tragedy for these kids? The fact that they really had had no music instruction of any kind before they were freshmen in high school, turned out to be from a scientific standpoint, very important, because we could see that certainly the kids who began their music training as adolescents had the same kinds of brain changes that we saw in the younger kids. Moreover, the number of labs have looked at learning in older people. And even if you’ve never played a musical instrument, your brain can change and you can continue to learn music, to learn new languages. And we have this very, very dynamic system, and I think we should embrace the differences in the way we learn at different ages, because as we’re older, we bring wisdom with us and we bring an understanding of what we’re doing that is very different from the way a child might approach learning, for example, a musical instrument. But the fact is that the benefits of playing a musical instrument, which are profound, really in terms of memory and attention and emotion, sociability, these are gifts from music that you want to experience throughout your life. Richard Miles (22:41): If we could just stay on that just a little bit more Nina, one of the fascinating things I saw in one of your papers was the connection of musical ability or music training to reading, and that you expected to find obviously, a connection to speaking, cause that’s sort of an auditory sound function, right? But reading, and I didn’t realize the extent to which a solid understanding of how a word sounds, how are phoning sounds is essential to reading a written word. So comment on that, but there’s a second part of my question. Let me put it in right now, what are the other cognitive things that you have found that improve? I mean, is there a link with math, for instance, do you increase math abilities among musicians? Are there any other cognitive things that appear to be improved or beneficial as a result of music training? Nina Kraus (23:24): So your first question is what does sound have to do with reading? And we learned to speak first and what we need to do when we read is we have to associate the sound of the letters with a symbol on the page. And so, we’ve known from decades of research that kids who have difficulty processing sounds have difficulty reading. So there is a very, very strong connection there. Also there’s a part of speech. When you think of music, you know that there’s rhythm in music, right? Rhythm is a part of music, but you don’t necessarily think about rhythm as being a part of speech. But it is. I mean, think of the difference between the word rebel and rebel. It’s the same word, but I have a different rhythm. And even though the rhythm isn’t as regular, we have tremendous rhythmic ability in speaking. So every Martin Luther King day, my husband and I listened to the, I have a dream speech and listening to Dr. King speak, it has this wonderful rhythm and cadence to it. And if I was saying those same words to you, you’d be looking at your watch, you’d be, when is this going to be over? But so much of the communication is rhythmic. If you want to have fun, do some YouTube searches for rhythm and music. And you’ll find there’s a guy who plays drums along with while people are speaking, it really pulls out what is not so inherently obvious. But after awhile you realize, Oh, this is really rhythmic. So this is another thing that gets strengthened. If you make music, you really make abilities get better. And the reason that we know that this is tied to reading is that again, for decades now, people have demonstrated that kids who have difficulty reading have difficulty with rhythm. Rhythm is one part of what gets strengthened with music. And I would say that it’s the rhythm, and it is the tuning, if you will, of important sound ingredients that together help achieve the gains, which is now the second part of your question, which is why do we care? And well we care because we want to know what to pay attention to. And in order to learn, we have to be able to pay attention to sounds. So, for example, my husband’s a real musician. And one day I was trying to learn a dire straits lead on the guitar and he came by and he said, Nina, if you just listen, you would realize that Mark Knopfler is not using his pick on the string each time. He’s not going to Dee Dee Dee Dee. The reason that he’s playing those notes so fast is because he’s actually pulling off the string with the fingers of his left hand, it’s called a pull off. And it has a very special sound to it, that I was deaf to. But now I know what that sounds like. And so when I hear it again, I have learned what to pay attention to. And it’s kind of automatic like, Oh yeah, I know what this is. And so there are so many associations with sound and our ability to pay attention and to then be able to pay attention to other sounds in the world that might be important, like a teacher’s voice or Phoebe’s voice across the room. So that’s one thing. The other is auditory working memory, in order for you to make sense of what I’m saying right now, you need to remember what I just said. So a typical auditory working memory test language is I’ll give you a list of words and then ask you to repeat back only the words that were names of cars that started with M. And so you think, okay, so what did she say? Which ones are cars, which ones start with M. And this is your auditory working memory that is kind of helping you make sense of what you hear constantly. So it’s very, very important. So on the test like this people who are musicians, someone who regularly plays a musical instrument, by the way, singing counts, then across the lifespan, people who are musicians have stronger auditory working memory skills and stronger attention skills, and any teacher will tell you. And one of the reasons this was interesting to me is that teachers will tell me all the time that the kids who play music are the ones who do better in school. Richard Miles (27:33): Nina, you alluded to this earlier, you talked about Brain Volts, which is essentially, you’re looking at ways to take this research that you’re doing or the findings, and basically help others in other fields. And if I understand it correctly, you can use this in addition to research, but also as a diagnostic tool, right? If you find somebody and it appears to be their audio processing capabilities off, that may be an indicator of something else, such as a concussion or maybe dementia or something like that. I’m not entirely sure about that. So I’m waiting for you to correct me, but is that what it is? And then how’s it gone in terms of setting up something to try to commercialize the technology. And this is something we talk on this podcast, a lot, a lot of people like you, researchers have something that they know has a value outside of the research arena, and they want to take that technology to market. And it’s very difficult. So it’s kind of hit or miss. And we know for the genesis of this particular podcast, the museum project was Gatorade, a research project with great success, but isn’t a tiny minority of what happens to typical research. So first of all, correct me, or affirm me that I have that description of your business model, correct. And then how’s it going in terms of going to market? Nina Kraus (28:43): So I think the two areas that we have been focusing on, one is language and literacy. And yes, the idea is to use this biomarker, if you will, as a way to provide additional information about a kid who might be having difficulty in school or is having various problems with language and learning. And the question is, is this coming from the fact that his brain is not processing sounds in a typical way? And to be able to at any age, just deliver sounds and just use some scalp electrodes to get this piece of information is very valuable. And people talk about diagnosis. I wouldn’t say that this would be the only thing that you would look at. Any clinician wants to have an armamentarium of clinical results. You go to your physician and he’s looking at all of your various test results, and hopefully he can put together this constellation of findings and be well-informed. Well, I think at being well-informed, if you have a kid with a learning problem, when a language delay, if it was my kid, I would want to know, is there a bottleneck? Is there a problem here with sound processing? I would also want to know is my kid at risk? So I can envision this as now they have newborn hearing screenings where every child gets a hearing test to make sure that they can actually detect the sounds. I could envision the kind of technology that we’ve developed as being something that would be side by side with that. And you would also be able to see is my child at risk for struggling to learn language or struggling to learn, to read way before he actually begins to struggle in school. Wouldn’t it be great to just know that this is a child who is at risk. And so there are various things that can be done, especially if you are aware of a potential problem early on Richard Miles (30:39): Nina, just to clarify, going back to your analogy of the sound volume knob versus the mixing board the tests are doing now, essentially just measuring the sound knob, right? Can they hear or not? And your test would give the ability to say, well specifically, are there things going on at the auditory processing level that bear watching or concern? Is that? Nina Kraus (30:58): Yeah, I mean the typical hearing test now is really, can you hear, there’s a range of pitches that language consists of, and can you hear very, very quiet sounds and your ears ability to hear what I am measuring more is the brain’s ability to understand what you hear. And so the sounds that we deliver, aren’t very quiet, they’re conversational level. So we already know that they can hear their ears are working fine. They’ve passed the hearing test from an ear perspective, but we want to know now, if I’m speaking conversationally, I know that you can hear me, does your brain process these different ingredients properly or not? And what are the strengths and what are the bottlenecks? And we know that there are certain signatures, and this is again, one of the things that we have patents on is that we know that there is a certain signature that’s associated with a language delay and literacy problems. And so you would want to look for that particular signature in a child that you were wondering about in terms of their current or their future language potential. Richard Miles (32:02): Could you use it to detect mild concussions? For instance, if there is neurological damage and traditional tests, weren’t willing indicating one way or another, is this another tool that you could use to figure out something is wrong here? Nina Kraus (32:14): Absolutely. Because most concussions, unless you have a cerebral bleed, you’re not going to see them on imaging. You need a very sensitive measure and sound processing. The brain does provide that. It’s also noninvasive. It takes 15 minutes to obtain and we have found again and again, we have papers and patents that describe that we’ve established this effect in youngsters who are elementary and high school aged kids. And right now we have a big study looking at division one athletes or northwestern athletes and NIH study, it’s a five year project. That was won on the strength of the original work that we did describing what is now a different neural signature. It doesn’t look anything like the language signature. There are other ingredients that are especially sensitive to head injury. And we can see this right now. I know that the whole issue of diagnosing concussion is a tricky one. And again, historically, people have been looking at vision. They’ve been looking at balance, but looking at hearing is fairly new. And one of the things that we have done in a couple of our studies is we followed our North Side Football League. These are our kids, and we gave them the vision test, the balance tests and the hearing tests. And you could see that they each tell us different things. So they’re not redundant. So you know how wonderful my vision is for a clinician, a trainer, a coach, position, to be able to look at balance, look at vision, look at hearing, and to have this biological marker that would inform the diagnosis of the injury and also inform return to play, because we know that concussions often occur in the same person shortly after they’ve had a concussion. And so, it might be that with the current measures that we have available, it looks as though the athlete is ready to return to play. But maybe if you had a more sensitive measure and objective measure, because again, the athletes are very motivated to do whatever they can to get back on the field. But if you have an objective measure that doesn’t require any kind of an overt response, wouldn’t it be great to know? Let’s just wait another week. His brain isn’t quite ready, just to wait a week or two. I mean, we see that the changes in the brain change very rapidly, usually as individuals, athletes, recover from their concussions. Richard Miles (34:44): Nina, I know you have a lab there where you can assess people with that method. Is this something that could be done with a medical device? It could be done in a doctor’s office or even in a trainer’s room? Nina Kraus (34:54): That’s what we do. When we went out to LA, we did this testing in instrument closets, and wherever we could find a spot, it’s very portable right now. It’s the size of a laptop. Richard Miles (35:04): Nina, this has been fascinating. And like I said, this could be episode one of a thirty podcast series on just sounds. I could listen to this all day and I’ll go meta for just one second here. We’re actually doing this in the medium of podcasting, right, that has made a huge resurgence as people like to listen now. And I don’t know what that says about humans or our society in general, but it is a throwback to the days of the thirties and forties, right? When people consumed a lot of their entertainment from radio shows. Right? And what I like about it forced a little bit of your imagination, and play, because it’s not laid out for you visually, you’re listening to somebody sound or a sound clip of a particular event. And anyway, I thought I’d throw that in there. We’re talking about sound on a medium that is only sound. Nina Kraus (35:44): I love that. I love that. And actually I have to say for myself, I do a lot of my reading, listening to audio books. I think we all spend probably too much time looking at screens. And it’s just wonderful to kind of give your eyes a rest and listen. Of course I love radio and podcasts and I consume books that way. Sound is awesome. Richard Miles (36:05): Nina, thank you very much today for being on Radio Cade, hope to have you back maybe with an update on Brain Volts or your new research. Thank you very much for joining us today. Nina Kraus (36:13): Thank you for having me take care of Richard. Bye. Outro (36:18): Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeek. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist Jacob Lawson.