Charles Ives

Although jazz is hailed worldwide as one of the United States' hottest cultural exports, the music often struggles to be heard in the country of its origin. American jazz fans had cause for celebration when Herbie Hancock's "River: The Joni Letters" was...

From the Connecticut River to downtown Hartford, from a red-hot converted firehouse in New Haven to cool college campuses, from a hallowed church sanctuary to a blue-ribbon beer fest, jazz of virtually every brand — from hard bop and soft pop to...

JOHN ADAMS is the voice of America. His instrumental music, and particularly that for the orchestra, conveys the American experience broadly. He is generous in his interests, which include the maverick Yankee-isms of Charles Ives, the populist strains...

ON THE morning I visited Elliott Carter last month, he was staying in a red cottage in this quaint village in the Berkshires. Five miles up the road is Tanglewood, summer home of the Boston Symphony, which was in the midst of hosting a 10-concert, 47-work...

Adding a dose of fire and brimstone to its expanding repertory on Friday, Los Angeles Ballet mounted a scorching rendition of "The Evangelist" at UCLA's Freud Playhouse in the first of five Southland performances at four venues. Choreographed in 1992...

In a warehouse space on a no-frills Westside industrial street, Thordal Christensen, co-artistic director of Los Angeles Ballet, points to a rickety little table. "Welcome to my office," he jokes. "We've been in here four months, so it's still a work...

"Realism leaves out so much," wrote science-fiction author Joanna Russ in 1995, introducing "The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women." Russ was making the common feminist argument that fantasy and fairy tale express the inexpressible, especially for...

The Litchfield Hills region of northwestern Connecticut is a rolling, forested landscape of hidden treasures. Here are historic villages and an unspoiled countryside with more state parks and public lands than any other area in Southern New England. While...

Where: 80 miles, one hour, 45 minutes, from .Nassau-Suffolk border, in western Connecticut. Why: Formerly a small country village amid the rolling hills of the Housatonic Valley, Danbury has grown into a cosmopolitan suburban town, complete with fine...

Three times Stravinsky's always shocking "Rite of Spring" has made history. The first was when its Paris premiere caused a riot 90 years ago. The second came with its inclusion 61 years ago in "Fantasia," the animated film in which great orchestral...

The Los Angeles Philharmonic opened the Walt Disney Concert Hall last week as though it meant it. That is a more striking notion than you might imagine. Concert hall openings are, not infrequently, debacles. These are complex buildings, and they are...

IT'S A GRANITE FACT of a composer's life that music doesn't take place on the page. Even after that last double bar has been written and the date of a work's completion ceremonially inscribed, the score exists only as an abstract idea. Desk drawers all...