Throughout December, make WCRB your home for holiday music!

"It would probably be fun to ride the skateboard and play my instrument and see if I could do it," he said. Also: the world's oldest audio recordings and the collectors who restore them, Copland's music played in Copland's house, and the fascinating hydraulophone.

“Reading is an act of civilization … it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities.”– Ben Okri, Nigerian poet and author

In the mid-1970s, more than 40 years before he won the Pulitzer Prize for music, pianist and composer Anthony Davis was driving with his wife to Boston for a concert when a police officer pulled them over .

Even this spring, when New York City was at the center of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S, the city's public parks never closed. Instead, they became a place where people went for a socially distanced refuge, often escaping into music with their headphones. Ellen Reid has taken that experience one step further: The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has written new music for a GPS-enabled app called Soundwalk, specifically designed to accompany walks around Central Park.

The 2000 film Requiem for a Dream celebrates its 20th anniversary this fall, and in that time there's at least one part of its legacy that's never faded: the music. The movie's haunted original score spawned a kind of breakout hit that would ripple through media for years to come, while also kickstarting a new career for its British-born composer, Clint Mansell.