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I am a Southern California-based musicologist, writer, editor, and speaker who has a passion for connecting others with classical music.

Whether through program notes, pre-concert talks, or blog posts, I seek to illuminate historical context, musical structure, and the stories behind the music in ways that are informative, interesting, and accessible to listeners.

So, enjoy looking around my website! Feel free to reach out if you want to chat or inquire about my services—I’d love to hear from you!

—Kevin

I love the vast surface of silence; and it is my chief delight to break it.

Carl Nielsen

Recent Blog Posts

The Rest is Noise: The Playlist

The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-nominated tome, remains one of the most impressive and convincing books on twentieth-century music. I recently finished reading through it a second time (the first was during my undergrad) and instantly fell in love with it all over again. Using cultural history, biography, style history, and analysis […]

by Kevin McBrien

Rethinking the Concert Hall – Part 4: Programming (New Music)

This is the fourth and final installment of my multiple-part series. You can read the previous parts here, here, and here. On December 20, 1973, Aaron Copland made a guest appearance on the public television series Day at Night. Within this wide-ranging and lively discussion, one particularly fascinating exchange occurs when the interviewer, James Day, inquires about Copland’s contemporary musical language: James Day: […]

by Kevin McBrien

Happy Birthday, Ludwig

This is intended as a postscript to my January 2020 blog post, “32 Thoughts about Beethoven (and his 250th Birthday.” Click here to check it out. On January 27, 2020, I published a blog post entitled “32 Thoughts about Beethoven (and his 250th Birthday).” In it, I expressed my lifelong admiration for Beethoven and his […]

by Kevin McBrien

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