It’s not fake news, it’s very real. This Month in Classical Music History is a series dedicated to finding stories of the good, the bad, and the downright weird. For December read about Handel fighting his best friend in a duel, an atonal composer thought to be a Nazi sympathizer, and one of Indiana’s own Jazz legends.

This week we asked Classical Music Indy’s own Program Director, Michael Toulouse, to reflect on emotions in music. Read below about the long history of music describing human expression, and how though our modern attention spans have shortened, music can almost instantaneously evoke a feeling.