Klaus Döring's Classical Music/Klaus Döring's Klassische Musik

  by  Emily E. Hogstad    December 28th, 2025 While they’re known primarily for their music, several iconic classical music composers also expressed their creativity through visual art. From Felix Mendelssohn and his Romantic era landscapes to John Cage and his chance-driven ink washes, these five composers created drawings, sketches, and paintings that help illuminate their artistic inner worlds. Today, we’re looking at the lesser-known art by five great composers. Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) Felix Mendelssohn Mendelssohn was not just a celebrated composer; he was also a prolific visual artist. He began taking drawing and painting lessons at an early age. Over the course of his lifetime, he produced hundreds of pieces of art in pen-and-ink, watercolour, and oils. It’s no surprise that this child of the early Romantic era favoured subjects like dramatic natural landscapes and historic architecture. Mendelssohn’s landscape painting During one fam...

   by  Frances Wilson     December 3rd, 2025 Composed in 1925, following on the success of ‘ Rhapsody in Blue ’,   George Gershwin ’s ‘ Concerto in F ’ is one of the most celebrated works that straddles the worlds of classical music and jazz. Commissioned by Walter Damrosch for the New York Symphony Orchestra , it was Gershwin’s largest and most complex work for the concert stage he had yet undertaken – a fully-fledged concerto in the classical three-movement format – and the first work he scored entirely by himself, thus signalling his determination to be taken seriously by the classical establishment. The work showcases his signature blend of rhythmic vitality, blues-inspired melodies and sophisticated orchestration and, like ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, it captures the energy and spirit of 1920s America, from bustling urban life to lyrical introspection. It stands as a landmark in American music , demonstrating Gershwin’s ability to fuse popular idioms with symp...

by  Emily E. Hogstad    Jazz, a catch-all term for a musical style that began to emerge from Black communities in the American South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revolutionized the international musical landscape around the turn of the century and beyond. Jazz popularized musical ideas that would prove popular across multiple musical genres, including Syncopation (“the practice of displacing the beats or accents in music or a rhythm so that strong beats become weak and vice versa”) Swing (“to play music with an easy flowing but vigorous rhythm”) Blue notes (“a minor interval where a major would be expected”) Polyrhythm (“a rhythm which makes use of two or more different rhythms simultaneously”) (All of those definitions come from Oxford Languages.) © omniamericanfuture.org Those four features are only scratching the surface of the traits that jazz provided to so-called “classical” composers, who, after the chaos of World War I, were looking fo...

The Polish-born American violinist Samuel Dushkin (1891-1976) is widely known for his extensive   collaborations with Igor Stravinsky . The two men were compatible friends from the very beginning and eventually embarked on a concert tour through Europe and the United States, which lasted for the better part of five years. Dushkin was said to have had a gentle, self-effacing, and considerate character, which sharply contrasted with Stravinsky’s fiercely dynamic, egotistical and combative demeanour. A biographer writes, “much of the success of the friendship must be attributed to the violinist’s wholly unaggressive nature, as well as to his rich sense of humour.” Samuel Dushkin Stravinsky and Dushkin first met in Paris in 1931, but both had been in town for some time already. Dushkin had studied at the Paris Conservatoire, taking violin lessons with Guillaume Remy and attending composition classes with Ganaye. He made his Paris début in 1918 and subsequently toured widely, giving man...