Entering Music
"Entering Music" is a weekly BTPM Classical radio program and podcast that celebrates the joy of musical discovery across generations, genres, and lived experience.
Co-hosted by beloved BTPM Classical hosts Stratton Rawson and Richie English — respectively, a 76-year-old lifelong music enthusiast and a 36-year-old working musician. The program bridges two distinct perspectives united by their deep love of music and the desire to share it with their listeners.
Each episode invites listeners to explore classical music and beyond through thoughtful conversation, storytelling, and carefully curated pieces. New episodes air Fridays at 10 am on BTPM Classical, with many full-length episodes available on-demand wherever you get your podcasts.
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Latest Episodes
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Stratton didn’t think he had heard Richie right. Richie had dropped the name of a long-forgotten pianist who was once the best-known and highest-paid pianist in the United States. Radio made him a star. His name was Oscar Levant. So, Stratton said, let’s talk about him. -
Stratton has often been asked if he and Richie ever disagree. His answer has been that, in musical matters, he can’t think of any disagreement, putting the emphasis on the adjective “musical”. Well, that was true enough until they decided to talk about opera by discussing the two greatest opera composers of the 19th century, Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner.
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Composers are rarely happy people. How do we know this? Because a few composers have told us this in their memoirs. Two of the best are the Memoirs of Hector Berlioz and X-Ray.
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Stratton often tells Richie how lucky they are because they have available to their ears over one thousand years of music. That’s why Stratton encourages Richie to introduce him to the popular music he pointedly refused to take notice of.
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Richie can’t really believe that Stratton has spent so much of his time listening to classical music that he has no notion of who Frank Zappa is or who Van Dyke Parks might be. But Richie knows that Stratton, who has a soft spot for Olivier Messiaen and Michael Tippett, is just the kind of guy who’d like the wild music-making of Zappa and Parks.
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When a listener begins to concentrate on a single composer’s works, they often listen for the piece in which the composer has found his or her own voice, a voice that from then on will mark the music they write as their own.
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The tale of the careers of two of the most famous women in the 19thcentury is now portrayed as a narrative of suppression and even oppression.
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Richie invites Stratton to listen to something he has actively avoided for 50 years – PUNK. There’s no telling how he’ll react…
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Stratton and Richie become aware that even sweet, joyful music-making can hide a suspicious, even outraged, personality.
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The Oxford Dictionary of Music claims that the term "virtuoso " is from Italian and means “exceptional performer.” By the late 18th century, it changed.