Arvo Pärt, Spiegel im Spiegel, 1978

Georg Friedrich Handel, Messiah, 1741

Claude Debussy, Clair de Lune, 1905

Jean Sibelius, Finlandia, 1899

Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, 1913

Ella Fitzgerald, Summertime, 1958

John Coltrane, A Love Supreme, 1965

Clara Schumann, Piano Trio in G minor, 1846

Maria Callas, Casta Diva, 1954

Camille Saint-Saëns, Carnival of the Animals, 1886

Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, 1865

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake, 1876

Dmitri Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 8, 1960

Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata, 1853

Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World, 1967

Nadia Boulanger, teaching studio, Paris, 1921

Erik Satie, Gymnopédie No. 1, 1888

Leonard Bernstein, West Side Story, 1957

Fanny Mendelssohn, Das Jahr, 1841

Amy Beach, Gaelic Symphony, 1896

Béla Bartók, field recordings, Transylvania, 1907

Florence Price, Symphony No. 1, 1933

Bessie Smith, Downhearted Blues, 1923

Kurt Weill, Die Dreigroschenoper, 1928

The rehearsal ran long, but no one thought to say so out loud.

The choirboy's voice broke mid-solo, and the congregation pretended not to notice.

She wrote the melody first and the words after, which her teacher always said was backward, though it was the only way she ever finished anything.

The record skipped on the same note every time, and eventually it became the note they waited for.

The silence after the final chord lasted longer than the piece itself.

He tuned the guitar by ear, never trusting the tuner, not even once.

The brass section came in a measure early at the wedding, and the bride, for reasons no one quite understood, began to cry.

She kept time with her foot, though no one could see it under the piano.

Written during Antonín Dvořák's residency in the United States, the Symphony No. 9 draws on the melodic character of African American spirituals and Native American music the composer encountered abroad, filtered through a distinctly Bohemian sense of harmony and orchestral color. Its themes, by turns yearning and triumphant, have since become so familiar that audiences often forget how strange and searching the piece must have sounded at its 1893 premiere.

Clara Wieck Schumann began performing publicly at the age of nine and was, by her late teens, among the most celebrated pianists in Europe, admired by audiences who often had no idea she also composed. Married to Robert Schumann and later a close friend and champion of Johannes Brahms, she continued to concertize for decades after her husband's death, supporting her family through a touring career that spanned nearly six decades.

The trumpet came in a beat late, and somehow it sounded intentional.

The choir rehearsed in the basement, where the acoustics, everyone agreed, were somehow better.

He kept his father's violin in its case for twenty years before he finally learned to play it, badly, and beautifully, all at once.

The organist played through the blackout, by memory, until the lights came back.

The same eight bars, repeated so often, began to feel like a question.

She could never remember the words to the anthem, only the tune.

The orchestra disbanded the year the hall was condemned, though a few of them kept meeting anyway, in someone's living room, out of habit.

No one clapped until the conductor's hands came down.

Maurice Ravel described Boléro as an experiment in orchestration rather than composition: a single melody, repeated without development, passed gradually across the orchestra's sections while a snare drum keeps an unbroken rhythm underneath. He is said to have been surprised by its enormous popularity, noting once that most orchestras don't want to play it, considering it to contain no actual music.

Duke Ellington led his orchestra for nearly fifty years, writing and arranging thousands of compositions that blurred the line between jazz and concert music long before critics had a name for it. He preferred the term "American Music" to any narrower label, and continued composing new works, including a series of sacred concerts, until the final months of his life.