Ten short pieces for choir by twentieth-century masters

Twentieth-century composers might not have churned out masses, motets and cantatas on the industrial scale of composers from earlier eras but there’s still plenty of great choral music to explore, much of it secular rather than religious in inspiration,
and often featuring a healthy dose of folk music influence. We’ve rounded up ten of our favourite short 20th-century choral classics to help get you started, many of them still relatively little known. Most are upbeat and relatively straightforward to sing – and with no single movement lasting more than five minutes offer manageably bite-sized introductions to some of the century’s leading composers.
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Charles III Coronation Music Guide

The Coronation of King Charles II on May 6th 2023 was an occasion dripping with magnificent music, both familiar and newly composed. In a lavish ceremony lasting over two hours the crack team of musicians provided all the pomp, gravitas and emotion that the ancient Coronation rite demands.

Here is the ultimate chronological guide to the music played on that day, complete with links to recordings of the newer works and the sheet music to those familiar classics, so you can play through the Coronation music yourself.
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The Music that Inspired Star Wars

We celebrate Star Wars Day (‘May the Fourth be With You’) by looking into the pieces that inspired John Williams’ magnificent soundtracks for these space operas.
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13-year-old singing sensation Malakai Bayoh takes talent show by storm

Malakai Bayoh recently wowed the judges on Britain’s Got Talent with his extraordinary performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Pie Jesu (from his Requiem). Originally written as a duet, Bayoh sang the trickier upper line as a solo with a purity and effortlessness that won the hearts of the Britain’s Got Talent audience and stony-hearted judge Simon Cowell. He ranked it as a ‘Golden’ performance, putting him straight through to the next round of the competition:

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How to play the Hosepipe

Making a brass instrument from a hosepipe may sound like something from a cartoon, but if you think about it, even the most expensive brass instrument is not much more than a bit of pipe with either keys, or a slide to make the pipe longer.
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Celebrating the Musical Creativity of the COVID-19 Lockdowns

Three years on since the first lockdown, in-person musical activity has - with a few exceptions - more or less returned to the way it was pre-COVID.

For all the difficulties and tragedies of the period, one thing that did happen was a flourishing of musical creativity. Despite the restrictions and the challenges, people found creative to musically connect with one another during that strange time. Here we celebrate a few of them.

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A Very Quick Guide To... The Song Cycle

What’s it all about?

2023 marks the 200th anniversary of the composition of Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin, one of the greatest song cycles ever written and the work which established the genre as the go-to option for classical composers wanting to transform the humble song-with-piano into a major musical artform.

Why the name “song cycle”? Sounds like a musical bike . . .

Save the jokes for later please. Although admittedly the term is a bit random, and it’s often tricky to distinguish between “proper” song cycles (from the German, Liederkreis, or “song circle”) and simple song collections. Some song cycles, like Die Schöne Mullerin, have a definite narrative coherence, telling a story from beginning to end. Others are looser, comprising collections of songs linked only by a particular mood, or setting words by the same poet.


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The composers who died in mysterious ways

Music history seen some of its best-loved figures die in the most unexpected ways. Here are eight of the oddest, bloodiest and sometimes tragically comic composers deaths we know of….
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Fourteen French pieces every flautist should know

What is it about French composers and the flute? There’s no shortage of music for the instrument ranging from the baroque to the present day, but if there’s a golden age in the flute’s long and varied history it’s unquestionably the period stretching from the end of the 19th century through to the mid 20th – and is tinged with an unmistakably French flavour. We’ve rounded up fourteen of our favourite pieces, from Borne to Boulez.
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Mozart's sister might have been an even better composer

We've all heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the most celebrated composers of all time. But could his sister have been just as good - or even better - if only she'd been given the same chances as her brother?


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