Lost history: opera's most famous premieres

Humour

When a few late-night serenades ended in street brawls between amateur guitarists and the husbands of the ladies at these windows, the police gave up their bribes and banned strummed instruments played by young men after sunset.

Organizing your scores: a serious business

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So, what's your method of choice? Maybe you're a strict Dewey Decimal supporter, or a die-hard Library of Congress fan. Maybe your system is simpler: "the pile on the piano over here" and "the ones not on the piano". And hey, if it works for you, let's not ruin a good thing.

3 life lessons that practice rooms can teach you

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Music students and graduates, how many hours do you think you've spend sitting in practice room hallways, thumbing through your scores, eagerly looking up as a door opens, hoping to God that it's someone leaving, and not just going for a pee/water break. Remember that poster/meme that was popping up for a while, something about "everything I need to know in life, I learned in kindergarten"? The game of finding a practice room is sort of like that.

Party on the stage with Gustavo Dudamel

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This video has made the rounds, both in its full form and in GIF-sized bites, since Gustavo Dudamel gave a New Year's Eve concert with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra and the Venezuelan Brass Ensemble in Caracas, Venezuela in 2007.

Opera haters: they exist, & that's alright

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Sure, it's disheartening, a bit maddening, and confusing, to stumble across someone who just really doesn't like opera. We want to challenge their opposition, ask them if they've ever been to an opera, heard anyone sing it besides Katherine Jenkins or Andrea Bocelli. The truth is, they may have heard the best of the best singing Verdi, Wagner, and Mozart, and they still hate opera.

"Hello, Papagena!"

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That's right. Stuart the Minion spots a fine-looking yellow fire hydrant in New York City, and he uses his best pick-up line, best translated as, "Hello, Papagena! You're beautiful like a papaya."

Gems: is your gender in sonata form?

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Tumblr user socialjusticeweg posted some fun ways of being the most unique-est, quirktastic-est, gender-mysterious-est person at school, with a bunch of new gender identification labels, all falling under the umbrella of "Musigender" (defined as "A gender that is closely related to musicianship or music theory").

Singable text: when composers make it tricky

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One of the biggest signs of that a composer has written well for the voice is when he or she sets the text in an organic way. In a broad sense, this means finding a rhythm and melody that works with the text, allowing it to be expressed the way the composer wants. In the same way that Verdi seemed to naturally fuse his music with the librettos he set, there are just as many examples of text setting that seems unnatural.

Hilarious: Darth Vader's theme in a major key

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When we were still in university, my classmates and I would nerd out on playing things like "Deh vieni, non tardar" in F minor, or "Mein Herr, Marquis" in G minor, and it was hilarious to us for reasons I can't quite articulate. This reminds me of those times.

Opera's love stories: 3 reasons they're doomed

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But why do all our preferred operatic love stories fall apart? The specifics are unique to each show, of course (mutual death by poison, general insecurities on both parties, etc.), but we think we can boil the problems down to three big categories.