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

Latest Scores

Latest recordings

Latest anecodotes

Latest Quotes


Featured content

Skepticism
“Great intellects are skeptical.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Antichrist, 54.  Digitally archived at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322-h/19322-h.htm, accessed 12 September 2021
Ravel’s compositional process
Robert de Fragny recalled a conversation with Ravel about his compositional process: The G major Concerto took two years of work, you know.  The opening theme came to me on a train between Oxford and London. But the initial idea is nothing.  The work of chiseling then begun.  We’ve gone past the days when the […]
Purpose of the arts
Super-Hooper-Dyne Lizzies
Harmann on orchestration
“To orchestrate is like a thumbprint. I can’t understand having someone else do it. It would be like someone putting color to your paintings.” – Bernard Hermann on orchestration. Hall, Roger L., A Guide to Film Music, p. 43.  Cited at Wikipedia.
Freedom for music
“In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side – there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.” […]
The tragedy of music
“The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection.” – Morton Feldman, American composer. Cited in a May 1976 interview, Studio International, November 1976, pp. 244-248.
First impressions of Schindler’s List
When renowned composer John Williams first watched a rough cut of Schindler’s List at director Steven Spielberg’s home in Los Angeles, he got so choked up he couldn’t speak. “I had to walk around the room for four or five minutes to catch my breath,” Williams recalls. “I said to Steven, ‘I really think you […]
Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest)
Title: Jack Sparrow, from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s ChestComposer: Hans ZimmerArranger: Greg SmithInstrumentation: Solo cello, string orchestra, tom-tom (optional)Product medium: PDF score and parts Available from Sheet Music Plus and Sheet Music Direct
Don’t loaf and invite inspiration
Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. […]