CATEURA, Paraguay — The sounds of a classical guitar come from two big jelly cans. Used X-rays serve as the skins of a thumping drum set. A battered aluminum salad bowl and strings tuned with forks ...

Once major composers like Haydn and Mozart adopted the style, the core members of the orchestra were pretty much set. Instruments such as the violin, flute, and horn made the cut, while the ...

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is just over a century old. It was formed in 1916, originally as part of the municipal government before it was reconstituted as a private institution in 1942. That ...

Ron Davis Álvarez stood on a train platform in Stockholm, stunned by what he saw. The Venezuelan orchestra conductor was visiting Sweden as part of a university exchange program. He’d expected his ...

Music can come from surprising places—even zoo animal enclosures. One group of (human) performers is proving that you don’t even need conventional instruments to make melodies. The Vienna Vegetable ...

Watch how the violin and string instruments make varieties of sound and music. Professor Richard Church, conductor of the University of Wisconsin Symphony Orchestra, introduces the violin and other ...

Composers have been writing music for the group of instruments we call an orchestra for the last four centuries. Endlessly adaptable and always evolving, an orchestra can be made up of 20 players or ...