This Week in Classical Music: August 3, 2026. Summer. We are exactly one month into the dog days of summer, and classical music is not high on most people's priority list. And, clearly, it’s also not at Ravinia Festival, the country's oldest outdoor music festival. It used to be a summer venue for the Chicago Symphony, dedicated almost solely to classical music, with a small addition of jazz, usually at the end of the season. James Levine was the music director for twenty years, followed by Christoph Eschenbach and James Conlon. Marin Alsop is now in charge. There’s still some classical music being performed, and the Chicago Symphony is still there. For example, in ten days they’ll be performing the music of Quincy Jones. We didn’t make this up: for one evening, one of the world's best symphony orchestras will perform music by Quincy Jones. Don’t take us wrong: we understand that Mr. Jones was a very talented person, a great producer, a jazzman, and composer of many popular tunes. But somehow the idea of the Chicago Symphony being employed to play this feels wrong. Maybe Ms. Alsop could explain it better.
Guillaume Dufay was born on August 5th of 1397 (or at least that’s how his date of birth was reconstructed by musicologists). He’s one of the greatest composers of the early French-Flemish musical Renaissance, and one of the earliest composers who could be included in what we generally accept as “European musical canon.” The “canon” is, of course, a tenuous notion. We understand it in purely aural terms: Dufay’s music is difficult, its idiom sounds somewhat strange to a modern (especially untrained) ear, but still, it can be enjoyed, or at least appreciated. This is different from the reconstructed music of, say, Léonin and Pérotin, composers of the so-called Notre Dame school who worked at the end of the 12th - early 13th centuries. We think their music lacks some of the fundamental qualities of rhythm, pitch, overall complexity, and development that could be enjoyed today. On the other hand, we can imagine that for Dufay, their music belonged to his canon. To illustrate, here’s Dufay’s motet Nuper rosarum flores (The Rose Blossoms Recently), which Dufay composed in 1436 to celebrate the consecration of the Florence Duomo, officially known as Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower; therefore, the rose in Dufay’s motet). Dufay’s polyphony sounds exotic but is musically understandable and enjoyable. And here is Viderunt omnes, Pérotin’s setting of a Gregorian chant, written sometime around the year 1200. It sounds (at least to our ear) as an auditory curiosity, a bit in the style of modern Minimalists, but outside the “canon.” We hasten to add that many listeners would argue that the music of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and their brethren, composers of twelve-tone and serial music, is also outside of the classical “canon.” That’s an interesting topic to consider.
The American composer William Schuman and three French composers, Cecile Chaminade, Reynaldo Hahn, and André Jolivet, were also born this week (Hahn was born in Caracas, but his family moved to Paris when he was a child, and he spent the rest of his life there).
Summer 2026
This Week in Classical Music: August 3, 2026. Summer. We are exactly one month into the dog days of summer, and classical music is not high on most people's priority list. And, clearly,
it’s also not at Ravinia Festival, the country's oldest outdoor music festival. It used to be a summer venue for the Chicago Symphony, dedicated almost solely to classical music, with a small addition of jazz, usually at the end of the season. James Levine was the music director for twenty years, followed by Christoph Eschenbach and James Conlon. Marin Alsop is now in charge. There’s still some classical music being performed, and the Chicago Symphony is still there. For example, in ten days they’ll be performing the music of Quincy Jones. We didn’t make this up: for one evening, one of the world's best symphony orchestras will perform music by Quincy Jones. Don’t take us wrong: we understand that Mr. Jones was a very talented person, a great producer, a jazzman, and composer of many popular tunes. But somehow the idea of the Chicago Symphony being employed to play this feels wrong. Maybe Ms. Alsop could explain it better.
Guillaume Dufay was born on August 5th of 1397 (or at least that’s how his date of birth was reconstructed by musicologists). He’s one of the greatest composers of the early French-Flemish musical Renaissance, and one of the earliest composers who could be included in what we generally accept as “European musical canon.” The “canon” is, of course, a tenuous notion. We understand it in purely aural terms: Dufay’s music is difficult, its idiom sounds somewhat strange to a modern (especially untrained) ear, but still, it can be enjoyed, or at least appreciated. This is different from the reconstructed music of, say, Léonin and Pérotin, composers of the so-called Notre Dame school who worked at the end of the 12th - early 13th centuries. We think their music lacks some of the fundamental qualities of rhythm, pitch, overall complexity, and development that could be enjoyed today. On the other hand, we can imagine that for Dufay, their music belonged to his canon. To illustrate, here’s Dufay’s motet Nuper rosarum flores (The Rose Blossoms Recently), which Dufay composed in 1436 to celebrate the consecration of the Florence Duomo, officially known as Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flower; therefore, the rose in Dufay’s motet). Dufay’s polyphony sounds exotic but is musically understandable and enjoyable. And here is Viderunt omnes, Pérotin’s setting of a Gregorian chant, written sometime around the year 1200. It sounds (at least to our ear) as an auditory curiosity, a bit in the style of modern Minimalists, but outside the “canon.” We hasten to add that many listeners would argue that the music of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and their brethren, composers of twelve-tone and serial music, is also outside of the classical “canon.” That’s an interesting topic to consider.
The American composer William Schuman and three French composers, Cecile Chaminade, Reynaldo Hahn, and André Jolivet, were also born this week (Hahn was born in Caracas, but his family moved to Paris when he was a child, and he spent the rest of his life there).