THE 5TH — MOVEMENT I, A Battle Brewing

Everybody sings the chorus, but superfans quote the verse. On this episode of Switched on Pop, Charlie and Nate trace the verse from Shakespeare through opera to TikTok, and songwriter Audrey Hobert shares her philosophy of specific verses and anthemic choruses: you can't have th ...  Show more

Research says you judge a song in under half a second. So why write an intro at all? On this episode of Switched on Pop, Charlie and Nate kick off their Netflix launch and probe what an intro means in today's musical landscape, alongside special guests like Aaron Dessner (Taylor ...  Show more

They are the most famous 8 notes in all of Western Classical Music. If you walk down the street and ask someone to name a piece of classical music, they will surely say Beethoven 5. But why? What's the deal with the 5th? Well, today we're going to take a deep look at this ubiq ...

This month's Beethoven podcast features a 1947 live recording of the symphony #5 by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler. 

There are few musical moments more well-worn than the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. But in this short, we find out that Beethoven might have made a last-ditch effort to keep his music from ever feeling familiar, to keep pushing his listeners to a kind of psyc ...

More than just 'da da da dum!

Beethoven's 5th Symphony accompanied Sir Robin Knox-Johnston on the regular Bombay to Basra route he sailed during his early days in the Merchant Navy.

Archaeologist and crime novelist, Dana Cameron, spent many a long day in a dark, ...