Happy New Year, Essential Arts readers! 2025 is already shaping up to be a feast of a year in terms of arts and culture in Southern California, and we here at The Times are ready to eat up. Here are ...

Let us make the case that the most successful music conservatory is not in Paris, Vienna or Berlin but rather, in a house on a tree-lined street in Nottingham, England. It might be an unpretentious ...

But, counterintuitive though it might seem, I don’t think sound is always a helpful way to understand genre. I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, ...