Music

Wanda Landowska revived the harpsichord in the 1920s after it had been considered obsolete for over a century. When pianists told her Bach sounded better on piano, she replied: You play Bach your way....

The oldest known musical instrument is a bone flute found in a cave in Germany, carved from a vulture wing about 40,000 years ago. Someone sat in that cave, in the dark, and played music before humans...

Beethoven was almost completely deaf when he composed his Ninth Symphony. At its premiere in Vienna, the audience gave a standing ovation. Beethoven couldn't hear the applause. A singer had to turn hi...

Robert Johnson, who essentially invented modern blues guitar, recorded only 29 songs across two sessions in 1936 and 1937. He died at 27 under mysterious circumstances. Those 29 songs changed the cour...

Buena Vista Social Club was a group of Cuban musicians, most in their 70s and 80s, who recorded an album in six days in a crumbling Havana studio. Ry Cooder brought them together. The album sold over...

Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian singer, once held a single note for so long during a Cairo concert that the audience erupted in tears. Her Thursday night radio broadcasts were so popular that crime rates dr...

The gamelan orchestras of Java tune their instruments to scales that don't exist in Western music. Each set of instruments is tuned only to itself, so pieces played on one gamelan cannot be performed...

In 1944, a group of prisoners at Stalag III-A performed Beethoven's Emperor Concerto from memory because they had no sheet music. The pianist played on a broken upright with missing keys. A French sol...

Ziryab, a freed slave from Baghdad, arrived in Cordoba in 822 AD and changed everything. He added a fifth string to the oud, introduced seasonal fashion, invented a three-course meal structure, and op...

Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century German nun, composed 77 liturgical songs, wrote books on medicine and natural history, and claimed to see visions of divine light. The Church investigated her three...

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan could sing qawwali for ten hours straight without repeating himself. When Jeff Buckley heard Khan's voice for the first time, he wept. Peter Gabriel flew Khan to England to recor...

In 1956, a 21-year-old Ravi Shankar played sitar at a concert in London for an audience that had never heard Indian classical music. The crowd applauded after his tuning. He smiled and said: Thank you...

In 1939, a musicologist named Hugh Tracey started recording African music across the continent. Over 40 years, he documented 35,000 songs from 200 ethnic groups. Most of these musical traditions have...

Brian Eno invented ambient music after a car accident left him bedridden. A friend put on a record of harp music but the volume was almost off. It mixed with the rain outside. Eno realized music could...

Maryam Akhondy collected recordings of Iranian women singing folk songs in private homes after the 1979 revolution banned female solo vocals. Many of these songs had been passed mother to daughter for...

Youssou N'Dour released a cassette in Senegal in 1994 that sold so many copies the factories couldn't keep up. The album, The Guide, later reached Western audiences and won a Grammy. He had been selli...

Fela Kuti once held a concert in Lagos that lasted 12 hours straight. He had 27 wives at one point, was arrested over 200 times, and invented an entire genre: Afrobeat. The Nigerian government sent 1,...

Bjork recorded her 2004 album Medulla using almost nothing but human voices. She hired Inuit throat singers, beatboxers, and a London choir. The album has no guitars, no keyboards, no drums. Just the...

The Aka pygmies of Central Africa sing in a polyphonic style where each voice is independent but interlocking, like gears in a clock. Ethnomusicologists spent decades trying to transcribe it. Western...

Billie Holiday first performed "Strange Fruit," a song about lynching, at Cafe Society in New York in 1939. The club turned off all the lights except a single spotlight on her face. No one applauded....

Wanda Landowska revived the harpsichord in the early 1900s after it had been considered obsolete for over a century. When a fellow musician insisted on playing Bach on piano, Landowska told her: You p...

Nina Simone auditioned for the Curtis Institute of Music at 18 and was rejected. She believed it was because she was Black. She spent the rest of her career channeling that fury into some of the most...

Oum Kalthoum's monthly radio concert in the 1960s brought the entire Arab world to a standstill. Shops closed, parliaments adjourned, and taxi drivers parked to listen. A single song could last four h...

Moondog, a blind Viking-costumed musician, lived on the streets of New York for 30 years. He composed symphonies on the corner of 54th and 6th Avenue. Philip Glass called him the most influential comp...

In 1952, John Cage premiered a piece called 4'33" in which the pianist sits at the piano and plays nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The music is whatever sounds the audience makes. I...

In medieval Europe, the tritone interval was called "diabolus in musica," the devil in music. Composers were forbidden from using it. Today it opens The Simpsons theme song and appears in nearly every...