Welcome to Wedgebill Music, the home page of Greg Smith, Australian composer and pianist.

PUBLICATIONS
– Sheet music
– Recordings

COMPOSITION SERVICES
– Composition
– Arrangement & Orchestration
– Transcription

EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
– Tuition (piano, aural, harmony, analysis, music history)
– Analysis
– Anecdotes
– Articles, papers, and program notes
– Quotes
– Research services

COLLABORATIVE PIANO
– Accompaniment and solo performance

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Latest Quotes

Featured content

The potential of an artist
“How important is it to catch up with yourself? There are enormous forces lurking in each person, but many people die without having discovered this. Of course it was clear at first glance that Mozart was a genius. But we don’t know whether anybody suspected the great gifts of the young Wagner. Nobody could guarantee […]
True greatness
Life is made up of little things. It is very rarely that an occasion is offered for doing a great deal at once. True greatness consists in being great in little things. – Charles Simmons (1852) A Laconic Manual and Brief Remarker: Containing Over a Thousand Subjects.  North Wrentham: Charles Simmons, p. 315.  Digitally archived […]
The source of inspiration
For me, inspiration comes from a bunch of places: desperation, deadlines… A lot of times ideas will turn up when you’re doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence — they come from two things flowing together. They come, essentially, from daydreaming. . . . And I suspect that’s something every human […]
Performers and performances
Write over improvise
If Heaven has bestowed on you a fine imagination, you will often be seated at your piano in solitary hours, as if attached to it; you will desire to express the feelings of your heart in harmony, and the more clouded the sphere of harmony may perhaps be to you, the more mysteriously you will […]
Capturing the pulse of the time
"I try to put the pulse of my times into my music and do it in a lasting way." – George Gerswhin Cited in: Greenberg, Rodney (2008) George Gerswhin.  New York: Phaidon Press, p.216.   '
The path of an artist
“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.” – Lao Tzuo, Chinese philosopher. Cited at: QuotationsBook
A “small” concerto
“I don’t mind telling you that I have written a tiny, tiny pianoforte concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo.  It is in B flat, and I have reason to fear I have worked this udder, which has always yielded good milk before, too often and too vigorously.” – Brahms on his Second […]
Hammerstein’s card games
Music theatre writer Oscar Hammerstein loved to play games.  His nephew recalls: There’s a family story about his game-playing. I can’t vouch for its authenticity, but it rings true. He was playing a very informal game of bridge with two of his collaborators, the composers Jerome Kern and Sigmund Romberg, and someone else one afternoon. […]
Musicians’ response to violence
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.  — Leonard Bernstein, 25 November 1963 Christopher Buchenholz, “An Artist’s Response to Violence”, Leonard Bernard Office, https://leonardbernstein.com/about/humanitarian/an-artists-response-to-violence. Accessed 18 March 2022.