Military bands had become commonplace, and the music had become standardized in three forms: slow and parade march; quick march; and double quick or attack march. Today we will be learning about marching musical styles, military orchestras, their development and standardization.

Slide or bottleneck guitar is a style popularised by the Mississippi Delta blues men of the 1930s. Their influence led to the development of many of the popular musical styles we hear today. The plaintive, haunting sound of slide blues guitar is now a popular soundtrack accompaniment to many well known films, TV programmes and advertisements.

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, composer of the beloved Nutcracker Suite, was an eccentric who lived a life worthy of a fantasy in a child's book.

Sight-reading is the musical art whereby a musician is able to play music they have never heard or seen before, instantly, reading from the sheet music with great fluency. There are many stories of the legendary abilities of the great composers, and today we will show you several hair-raising examples that will have you running to the practice rooms to hone your sight-reading and related abilities. Or perhaps you will collapse in frustration. Read on. Mozart was said to be able to read and play any music instantly. No practicing, no rehearsing. Not only that, he could, for example, write out the four separate parts of a string quartet BEFORE he had written out the complete score. This means that he had a perfect mental impression of every note in a piece he had never played, and never heard. Beethoven once had to play one of his piano concertos on a piano that was a half step out of tune. With no time to tune the instrument, there was only one choice: play the concerto not in the key of C, but in the key of B, instantly, which he did with not a single wrong note, to the utter astonishment of the orchestra. To put this in perspective, in case you don't know what musical "keys" are, it is like an actor who, five seconds before taking the stage as Hamlet, is told suddenly, "Oh, by the way, please do the part in Swedish." No problem, said Ludwig, and did it straightaway. Liszt was legendary for his technical flights of fancy. Once the composer Grieg brought the great master his A minor piano concerto, which he humbly showed to Liszt in a handwritten manuscript. It was a very messy manuscript, indeed, for by Grieg's own account it was full of scratched out passages and terrible music handwriting. But Franz Liszt was not deterred by the tattered condition of the score. He calmly opened it, looked at it for a moment and then played it perfectly and with gusto in front of the dumbfounded composer. All the while Liszt missed not a note, mind you, keeping up an erudite and witty commentary on the orchestra parts, which he played as well, along with the solo piano part. Liszt was in fact encyclopedic in his knowledge of all the music published in his lifetime. He is said to have played every known piece in history, perfectly, in his weekly master classes. And this included not only piano music, but any music, operas, symphonies, concertos, popular music. Anything. In a spirit of encouragement, remember that even Liszt had to develop this breathtaking musical craft. When he first came to Paris as a teen aged firebrand, he was a gawky Hungarian boy and needed polish in order to become the first genuine superstar of classical music. Now go back and practice.

There are many famous instances of immortal musicians being insulted by other famous musicians. Johann Sebastian Bach, like most musicians of the day, worked as a church musician. He was anything but docile, and was known to rankle easily.

Hugo Wolf, who lived from 1860 to 1903, is recognized as the greatest composer of songs after Franz Schubert. What few people know is that Wolf was half insane most of his life, and died miserably in an asylum.

The invention of electronic instruments such as the Theremin and the Ondes Martenot in the 1920s and 1930s introduced a new method of creating music. Though Techno is not usually performed with a live drum player, it may at times require a drummer to replicate desired sounds.