Rob Kapilow

When I was in college, I was very fortunate to have Rob Kapilow as a choral conductor and music history professor. Rob has an uncanny knack for boiling down the brilliance of a piece of music so that anyone could hear it in just a short snippet. “Anyone else would have written this,” he’d say, playing four or five bars of familiar but uninspiring music, “but Mozart wrote this.” He’d play the same four or five bars, changing one note, or one chord, or one rhythm, and suddenly you would understand. It was a revelation every time. Rob has gone on to become a star on NPR and PBS, with a series called What Makes It Great.