“There is no anxiety in the present. Anxiety is either in the past, worrying about what was just played, or in the future, worrying about what you are about to play. Nothing can be done about either! Don’t judge or evaluate while you’re performing.” — Charles Schlueter, principal trumpet with the Boston Symphony. Cited in: […]

Songwriter Johnny Green recalled Gershwin bragging about his achievements after a concert, eventually to stop and say: “That’s enough about me.  Now what did you think about how I played?” Cited in: Greenberg, Rodney (2008) George Gershwin.  New York: Phaidon Press, p.46.

Title: Easy Street (Silent film soundtrack) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score     Related products:     – MP3 soundtrack BACKGROUND: FILM:     Written by: Charles Chaplin, Vincent Bryan & Maverick Terrell     Starring: Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance & Eric Campbell     Directed by: Charles Chaplin & Edward Brewer     Released: 1917 SAMPLE:

“Art,” announces Pat Buchanan to Charlie Rose, “is meant to be uplifting.” What a relief!  After all these years I’d never realized that Art had a moral purpose.  No more need now to be upset by Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Picasso and Goya, Stravinsky and Berg, Sophocles and Williams.  Pat has clarified the rules, set the […]

I need time to be idle in order to experience and romance my muse, Music, my lifelong partner. In some ways, when I think about the enforced thirty minute practice sessions and much-resented violin lessons during Friday recess which introduced us during my early childhood, our story feels a bit like the plot of a […]

In 1720 in Italy, opera was largely dictated by the egos of the singers, rather than considering the text, or the composer: The satirical writer Marcello wrote that the opera composer will hurry or slow down the pace of an aria, according to the caprice of the singers, and will conceal the displeasure which their […]

In 2010, Violinist Nikolaj Znaider performed Elgar’s Violin Concerto on the same 1741 violin in which Kriesler premiered the work on a hundred years before. Znaider was not worried about comparisons to Kriesler’s original performance: “he way I think of music is that it really is something that is played in the moment – it’s […]

“The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.” Paul Klee, Swiss painter Cited at QuotationsBook

Title: Bless the Lord, my soul Text: Psalm 103 (104): 1-2, 3-4, 24-25, 27-30 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and partSAMPLE:

Language is at its most powerful when it disturbs, not by arriving at insights/understandings, but by creating possibilities. – Thomas Ogden T. Ogden, Reveries and Interpretations: Sensing Something Human, Lanham, Roman & Littlefield, 2004, p. 219.