One of the latest and most exciting trends in Colombian music is the fusion of traditional rhythms and melodies with electronic beats and modern influences. The Music Voyager team explores this cutting-edge Bogotá scene starting with an electrifying live performance in the streets with La Mojarra Eléctrica. Then, meet British DJ and producer Richard Blaire, whose Sidestepper project pioneered the electrotropical trend. Systema Solar gives a taste...

The brave men and women who fight in our country’s military, both inside and outside of the United States, often leave something behind – a family. This kind of lifestyle can be difficult to adjust to, but also provides opportunities that non-military families don’t usually have. In this segment, we meet some kids just like you who have one or more parents in the service, and have learned to adapt to the military lifestyle.

In the period between the two World Wars, composers sought to express in music the jarring and discordant sense that civilization was giving way to barbarism. During the same time, jazz burst upon the international musical scene. Performers include the Moscow Classical Ballet Company, Maxim Shostakovich conducting his father's Symphony No. 7, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Sir Peter Pears and Galina Vishnevskaya in Britten's War Requiem, and an electric...

Mozart was without doubt the most prodigiously gifted of all Western composers. More than any other composer, it is his mythological biography - from the archetypal 'Wunderkind' childhood to his early obscure death - that defines our popular conception of a great composer. This film unravels two hundred years of fiction and myth. The deteriorating relationship Mozart had with his father, and his choice of Constanze for his wife are re-assessed in...

Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, is considered the most powerful woman in American politics. Pelosi was the first female Speaker of the House and the first woman to be third in line for the presidency. Among her greatest accomplishments in government was the passage of the Affordable Care Act/Obama Care, providing millions of Americans access to medical insurance. She shares what it was like wielding such political...

Margot Fonteyn said that the future of ballet lies in the hands of the people of Asia. We will focus on the development of ballet in Asia. What have Hong Kong and China done with the Russian "Vaganova" technique and why are they winning all of the ballet competitions around the world?

An orally transmitted musical heritage of a culture, in the 1930s, enjoyed a resurgence during the Great Depression following stock market crash, droughts and dust storms encouraged farmers out of the dust bowl to California and New York State. The American folk music revival began with performers like Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Paul Robeson. Breakthrough act The Weavers sang traditional folk songs from around the world, as well as blues, labour songs,...

Today Opera Easy zeroes in on one of the most fascinating and intriguing operas in all of operatic history," says host Natalie Choquette. "The composer of today's featured work was born in Germany in 1819 but became a naturalized Frenchman. He was called the King of the Operetta, having written over 90 popular and hilarious operettas for the Parisian stage during the Second Republic. Yet Jacques Offenbach's dream was to write an opera. When the opera...

Pipe organs are the most majestic of musical instruments, and each one is a unique work of art named after its designer. This program studies the painstaking craftsmanship in wood and metal that goes into pipe organ construction and illustrates the function of the instrument's many parts. The voicing process, in which the volume and tonal quality of a pipe organ is adjusted to suit the acoustics of its location, is also explained. Generous musical...

In this program, African jazz musician Edmund "Ntemi" Piliso traces the roots of African jazz from the days of apartheid in 1940s Alexandra Township. With musical performances throughout highlighting the various eras, Piliso moves through the days of pennywhistle jive groups hustling change on streetcorners, to the sounds of marabi-a bittersweet fusion of American jazz and the restless rhythm of an uprooted tribal culture. The latter sound, lost for...