Summer leaves town. It’s getting colder, darker, and rainier in Berlin these days, and yet no opera season begins. What can one do? Listen to music, read books, write dissertations, and – of course – browse the web. Let me tell you, there is a lot to discover when you type “conversations about music” into the google search engine. Already the first hit that comes up will probably keep you busy for a couple of hours. Whether what you find at the Library of Congress website will delight you or make you feel miserable, has a lot to do with whether you can bear comments like this one from a certain Mr. Danielpour: “The bottom line for pop music is essentially to make money, I think, in most cases over creating a work of any lasting value.” Funny. That comes from a composer who is being described as “the only living composer with an exclusive recording contract with Sony Classical (Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland had similar contracts)” on the Great Conversations in Music website.

Anyhow, the project website contains a couple of interviews with prominent musicians, composers, and conductors, amongst them Milton Babbitt, Ned Rorem, Charles Rosen, Claude Frank, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Zubin Mehta. It also features a couple of facsimiles of music manuscripts that are discussed in the videos. These are really worth checking out.