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
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– Articles, papers, and program notes
– Quotes
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COLLABORATIVE PIANO
– Accompaniment and solo performance

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Featured content

Elgar’s distractions
In a radio interview in 1937, Edward Elgar’s violinist friend William H. Reed described Elgar’s “distractions” while composing the violin concerto: I can never play the last movement without seeing the River Wye flowing past the meadow at Hereford where Sir Edward and I used to practise throwing a boomerang in our “off-time” between working […]
Borge on Borodin
"My favorite Russian composer is Borodin, mainly because he had the shortest name. Except for Cui, who was just showing off. […] Cui wrote an opera called A Feast in Time of Plague. Shows you what kind of guy HE was." (Victor Borge, My Favorite Intermissions, New York, 1971, p133)  
Silence, expression, and music
From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death—all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes […]
Glinka’s compositional priorities
“My earnest desire is to compose music which would make all my beloved fellow countrymen feel quite at home, and lead no-one to allege that I strutted around in borrowed plumes.” – Mikhail Glinka Cited in Jerremy Nicholas, “Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka”, Classic FM, April 2012, p.35.
Work joyfully and peacefully
If you will become possessed of this faith you will not need to bother about your success or failure, for success will come.  You will not need to be anxious about the results, and will work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that right thoughts and right efforts will inevitably bring about right results. — James Allen […]
Leave Me Alone (Lasst mich allein) (Dvorak)
Title: Leave me alone (Lasst mich allein) (op. 82, no. 1) Composer: Antonin Dvorak Text: Ottilie Malybrok-Stieler Arranger: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:
Figaro and an egg
“I always have a hard-boiled egg. A three-minute egg. Do you know how I time it? I bring it to the boil and then conduct the overture to The Marriage of Figaro. Three minutes exactly.” Sir John Barrirolli Cited in: The Music Lover’s Quotation Book. Ed. Kathleen Kimball, Robin Peterson & Kathleen Johnston. Toronto (Canada): […]
Du bist die Ruh (You are my Rest) (Schubert)
Title: Du bist die Ruh (You are my Rest) (Op. 59, No. 3) Composer: Franz Schubert Arranger: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Trombone and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:
Performance practice issues in Russian Piano Music
ABSTRACT The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the rapid growth of musical culture in Russia. This resulted in a large repertoire of piano music — ranging from miniatures to virtuosic etudes and sonatas. Growing out of the nineteenth century romantic tradition, and highly influenced by the social conditions of the time, Russian composers developed a distinctive style which […]
Jan Lisiecki on interpretation
My approach is to sit with the score and make my decisions about what Andante means or what piano means in a certain context; often you go back to recordings and find that nobody’s ever really played it that way. You ask yourself ‘Why is that? Did I misread or misinterpret something? Or is this […]