John Check

John Check explains how Willa Cather’s classic, now 100 years old, still sings and dances.

How the YouTube powerhouse Postmodern Jukebox arose from one pianist’s knack for covering recent songs in vintage styles.

When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was relieved of his duties in June 1781 as court organist to Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, the 25-year-old had every reason to believe he would achieve great success on his own. Conditions in Salzburg, the city of his birth, had become unbearable, owing in…

"You are no good." These were not the words Gregor Piatigorsky, a nervous performer, needed to hear as he warmed up before playing a concerto with the New York Philharmonic. The man who uttered them, the conductor Arturo Toscanini, then said, “I am no good.” The effect on Piatigorsky was immediate…

Supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music, a master comparable in greatness of stature with Aristotle in philosophy and Leonardo da Vinci in art. No overstatement whatsoever attaches to this, the opening of the entry for Johann Sebastian Bach in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. So vast and…

Supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music, a master comparable in greatness of stature with Aristotle in philosophy and Leonardo da Vinci in art. No overstatement whatsoever attaches to this, the opening of the entry for Johann Sebastian Bach in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. So vast and…

"What sound will accompany the end of days?" For Laurent Dubois, the question admits of one ringing answer: the sound of the banjo. A professor of Romance studies and history at Duke and "obsessed" amateur banjo player, Dubois relates here a history of the instrument that is both learned and…

Vladimir Horowitz and Maria Callas, Ella Fitzgerald and Laurence Olivier, Sarah Bernhardt and Luciano Pavarotti—these transcendent performers communicated a point of view, an inexpressible feel for life. And they did so despite their spells of stage fright.

Rosemary Clooney was brought back to popular consciousness a half-dozen years ago in an episode from the first season of Mad Men. Viewers were treated to a rendition of “Botch-a-Me,” one of her conspicuous successes of the 1950s, a time when she recorded many hit records (the biggest being “Come…

Discussions of what would prove to be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s last years tend to fixate on his death. Much talk there is—for Christoph Wolff, too much talk—of Mozart’s decline or fall, of the quality of resignation that supposedly crept into his music, even of the “autumnal world” that his late…