To me it’s all about how you read and translate the music you play: the most important thing is to reach the point where you feel you understand what happened in the composer’s mind before he actually wrote it. Musical notation is a very sophisticated yet imperfect system; it was the only way for the […]

“The advice I am giving always to my students is above all to study the music profoundly.  Because the music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees, or the contrary.” Andrés Segovia, guitarist.  Cited in: Cited in: Kimball, K., Petersen, R., Johnson, K. […]

“He accomplishes enormous difficulties, but so quietly, so smoothly and with such constant delicacy and refinement that the listener is not sensible of their real magnitude.  It is the exquisite delicacy, with the liquid mellowness of his tone, and the pearly roundness of his passages of rapid articulation which are the peculiar features of his […]

“His creation was spontaneous and miraculous. He found it without seeking it, without forseeing it. It came on his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk when he was impatient to play it to himself. But then he began the most heart-rending labor I ever saw. It was a […]

Title: The just will live in the presence of the Lord (Setting II) Text: Psalm 14 (15):2-5 (setting ii) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:

“Tchaikovsky reminded me, in more ways than one, of his countryman Tourgéniew, whom I once met at Madame Viardot’s. He had none of the Northern roughness, was as polished as a Frenchman in his manner, and had something of the Italian in his temperament… For all the belief which he had in himself, he was […]

Title: Blessed the people the Lord has chosen (setting ii) Text: Psalm 32 (33) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part SAMPLE:

“The more work that you make, the more energy you have to make work.” – Garry Stewart, artistic director of the Adelaide-based Australian Dance Theatre. Edwards, Verity. “Dance maker with edge on top of world”, The Australian, 22 July 2011, p.7.  

Title: Elegie II Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part SAMPLE:

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour. — Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque, 1881 Stevenson, R. L. (1895). Works. United States: P. F. Collier, Vol. 2, p. 119