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Original manuscripts by Bach, Mozart and Brahms form part of a 139-item collection of sheet music donated to the Juilliard School in New York. The artefacts - donated by collector Bruce Kovner, chairman of the music acedemy's board - will be housed in a reading room from September 2009. Highlights include working manuscripts of Beethoven's only opera Fidelio and Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No 9. School president Joseph Polisi said it was "by its very definition priceless". A lifelong music lover, Kovner began collecting manuscripts more than 10 years ago when he noticed a flow of rare artefacts coming onto the...

A recently discovered aria by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) is to receive its first-ever modern performance in Weimar at the beginning of September, organisers of the city's Kunstfest said yesterday. German soprano Juliane Banse will perform the hitherto unkown work, discovered this year in the archives of the famous Anna-Amalia Library in Weimar, on September 3 in the ceremonial ballroom of Weimar's Residenzschloss palace. Banse will be accompanied by Hungarian pianist András Schiff on harpsichord and the French-Austrian string quartet, Quatuor Mosaïques. The two-page handwritten aria, entitled "Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn' ihn" ("Everything with God and nothing without...

When I was a boy, my parents used to enjoy a comedian named Ronnie Graham. One of his jokes was, "The other day a cat came up to me and said, 'How do I get to Carnegie Hall?' and I said 'Practice, man, practice.' This other cat came up to me and said, 'Meow.' He was a real cat." We talk a lot in our movement about spiritual practices. I am a Religious Science Practitioner; the root word of Practitioner is practice. But why do we practice? Ernest Holmes said that a central concept of our movement is "Perfect God,...

BERLIN (AP) - Experts have discovered a previously unknown work by Johann Sebastian Bach in a German library, a research foundation devoted to the composer said Wednesday. Historians found the aria in May in the Anna Amalia Library in the eastern city of Weimar, the Bach Archiv foundation said on its Web site. There was no doubt about the authenticity of the handwritten, two-page score, dated October 1713, Leipzig-based the foundation said. It was the first unknown vocal work by Bach to surface since the discovery of the single-movement cantata fragment "Bekennen will ich seinen Namen" (BWV 200) in 1935,...

The Old Master By James Bartel With his first wife Maria Barbara, his soulmate as history tells us, Sebastian Bach fathered seven children. The first child was a daughter, Catharina. A pair of twins died within days. The final son died within a year. Months later, Maria Barbara succumbed to disease. Bach was then 35 and engaged in the full awakening of his genius. His workload was Herculean and mounting, and now there were five children at home without a mother, the oldest being 12. Staggered by grief, Bach shouldered on. Hear the Old Master speak: "I was obliged to...

Dec. 11, 2003 The Turbo touch The panel entrusted with the task of choosing a new attorney-general earlier in the week disqualified Justice Minister Yosef Lapid's candidate, Yoram Turbowicz, seemingly on a technicality. In fact, the commission's motives went deeper. Much was made of the fact that the committee nixed Turbowicz because by its count he hadn't spent the minimum time required – 10 years – in legal practice. By Turbowicz's own reckoning it was a full dozen years. But to quibble over these details is to miss the point. The committee never got to seriously deliberate Turbowicz's credentials, nor...

Apropos of nothing much, I thought some others would want to listen to the lovely music at this link. It's Bach organ music--lovely stuff for wrapping up a Sunday.

Rosalyn Tureck, a pianist and harpsichordist who played an important part in the revival of interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and who devoted more than six decades to performing, researching, teaching and writing about his works, died on Thursday at her home in Riverdale, the Bronx. She was 88. Ms. Tureck, born in Chicago, spent many years living in London, where she acquired a regal bearing and the hint of an upper-crust British accent. She was as comfortable in literary and scientific circles as in musical ones, and was ahead of her time in arguing for a...