Best Music Salon Posts of the Year

As the year winds down I will be going out of town on vacation, so I won't be doing a lot of blogging over the next week or so. So I would like to point you to what I consider to be some of the best posts of the year. Here they are, one from each month:

Best Posts of the Year

1. January: Haydn Adagios, Part 2
2. February: all the posts reviewing Hilary Hahn's encore project especially the last one.
3. March: Lots of good stuff in March, especially on Sibelius, but I'm going to pick a post about the typology of music, how we categorize stuff called Musical Style and Genre.
4. April, lots of possibilities of which I am going to pick a post surveying the String Quartet Since 1900.
5. May: one post was on Music and Self-Expression.
6. June was the month I really got into Swedish composer Allan Pettersson and his fifteen symphonies. Here I talk about their Stormy Weather and Lyrical Islands.
7. In July I put up a post about phrase structure in Baroque, Classical and Modern music called Harmony and Phrase Structure.
8. In August, I put up a couple of posts about the Greatest Composers Before Bach (and part 2)
9. In September I put up a think piece on how philosophical talk about music sometimes goes astray. The title was Music Utters the Unutterable.
10. For October I am going to pick one of my early posts in my Concerto Guide series titled: Origins of the Instrumental Concerto.
11. In November I talked about some of the failings of music critics in a piece called Music Writing Then and Now.
12. And just a few days ago I did a post on Mozart's wonderful Sinfonia Concertante.

So go have a look. There were lots of other posts this year that you might have missed.

Here is a piece by one of those greatest composers before Bach, Guillaume de Machaut:

UPDATE: The link to "Harmony and Phrase Structure" was incorrect and has been fixed.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah and best wishes for the holidays.