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

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Featured content

Knowledge represents inner strength
“Knowledge is not a passion from without the mind, but an active exertion of the inward strength, vigor and power of the mind, displaying itself from within.” – Ralph Cudworth, Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731)
Hoyt Curtain’s compositional process
Hoyt Curtin (1922-2000) was the primary composer for the Hanna Barbara studios. Popular theme songs he composed include The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons, Johnny Quest, Superfriends, Josie and the Pussycats, The New Scooby-Doo Movies, and The Smurfs.  Of these, his favourite was The Flintsones, “I guess because it is a kick to hear musicians […]
On Artur Schnable’s playing
Artur Schnabel is a pianist unlike any other. One is conscious in listening to him of a powerful and original mind revealing unsuspected meanings and complications in music as familiar as Brahms’s Intermezzi and Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ Sonata. His tone is a rule dry in anything above a piano, but a sudden touch of the pedal […]
Easy Street
Title: Easy Street (Silent film soundtrack) Composer: Greg Smith Performer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: MP3 soundtrack     Related products     – PDF score TRACK LISTING AND SAMPLES: TRACK TITLE LENGTH SAMPLE 1. A new beginning 4:07 2. Easy Street 7:06 3. Law and order 1:22 4. Aid where aid is due 1:33 5. Poverty and […]
Climbing Mount Fuji with a cello in hand
“In 2007 Italian cellist Mario Brunello climbed to the summit of Mount Fuji and played selections from Bach’s cello suites, declaring that “Bach’s music comes closest to the absolute and to perfection.” Source: Siblin, Eric (2009) The Cello Suites. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. p.6.
Brahms’ ladies choir
Brahms formed a Ladies Choir of about fifty singers: “Fix oder Nix” was the motto he coined for them – “Bang up or nothing”; and he promised to write all the music they could sing if they would meet regularly, and always on time.  He even drew up a set of humorous rules.  “Avertimento” it […]
New art and the old formulae
An art gathers new material usually by an original rejection of old formulae, a gesture of negation. At the beginning, this gesture is conscious, defiant, it lacks any other reason for existence than the very healthy one that dogma is death. In the turmoil of growth and expansion, this negation and denial loses its identity […]
Liszt’s account of a performance by Chopin
Franz Liszt described one of Chopin’s concerts in the Gazette musicale, May 2 1841. Last Monday, at eight o’clock in the evening, M. Pleyel’s rooms were brilliantly lighted up; numerous carriages brought incessantly to the foot of a staircase covered with carpet and perfumed with flowers the most elegant women, the most fashionable young men, […]
One way to get a doctorate
Robert Schumann aspired to be awarded a doctorate degree. On January 31 1840, Robert Schumann asked a friend to appeal to the University of Jena to give him an honorary degree, or set him a degree to pass, on the grounds of: “My sphere of action as an editor on a high-class paper, which has […]
Saint-Saëns on composing
“I produce music as an apple tree produces apples.” — Camille Saint-Saëns Musical Heritage Review. Musical Heritage Society, volume 1, issues 13-18, p.47.