KPAC Blog

San Antonio's vocal chamber group the Copperleaf Quintet, has an afternoon of music for Lent planned this weekend. On the program are works by Francisco Guerrero and Tomas Luis de Victoria.

"His [de Victoria's] lines are just so exquisite, and when they are so exposed by just having one person on a part singing them, it's just a wonderful thing to hear!" said Ruth Moreland, the director and soprano for the group.

MISERERE: Reflections for Lent

Sunday, February 24, 2013 at 3:00 p.m.

Ground-breaking avant-garde composer and musician Morton Subotnick has been called the father of electronic music and is a visionary who predicted the age of non-linear interactive media.

Subotnick is in San Antonio for a series of concerts and workshops and he continues to educate and enlighten audiences around the world with non-traditional structures of music.

This weekend the San Antonio Symphony completed their Brahms Festival and sent out their next season to subscribers. Today they publicly announced the lineup that includes superstar violinist Joshua Bell, local favorites The Children's Chorus of San Antonio, and a Dvorak Festival.

This year is the bicentennial of Richard Wagner's birth. The man widely called the greatest living Wagnerian tenor is marking the occasion in style — and asking listeners who may have turned away from the German composer to give his music another chance.

You hear some music you hate. That's fair. We all do on occasion. But can you learn to love — or at least not loathe — that music? Can you intentionally transform the visceral response you have to certain pieces and styles, or does that happen at some more incalculable, subtle level?

Researchers at Australia's University of Melbourne say that the more dissonance (which they describe as "perceived roughness, harshness, unpleasantness, or difficulty in listening to the sound") that we hear in music, the less we enjoy said music. Seems obvious enough, right?

Over the years of listening to the San Antonio International Piano Competition, I've noticed that nerves play an important part. Just enough, and a performance can be charged with excitement, too much, and disaster awaits.

With the competitors narrowed from 11 to eight, the stakes are higher, and that could help the judges separate the best as the competition continues.