Title: Miniature I Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano duet Level: Piano I – Level 1 (5 finger position, left and right hands) Product medium: PDF score & MP3 accompaniment track (Audio sample of accompaniment track only)

At the core of Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations, an esoteric and astonishing piano piece lasting some 50 minutes, is one of the intriguing mysteries of music history. Why did Beethoven, during the difficult last decade of his life, when he was deaf, chronically ill and often in financial straits, become nearly obsessed with writing an extensive […]

The practice of wearing white gloves whilst conducting was common in the nineteenth century. The Musical times reported in July 1884 that: “A German conductor,” we are told, “in order that the public may be more deeply impressed with the feeling of grief intended to be produced by the Funeral March in Beethoven’s ‘Eroica Symphony,’ wears […]

“By and large, though, there are few, if any, bad side effects of music, and music can often work where no medication can.” – Oliver Sacks Cited in: Inge Kjemtrup, “The power of music therapy”, Pianist, Issue 59, April-May 2011. Warners Group Publications, p.66.

Title: Unless the Lord has built the house Text: Psalm 126 (127) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB Product medium: PDF score Sample:

From 1882, nine-year-old Rachmaninoff moved to St Petersburg to study at the conservatoire. In the comfortable knowledge that, even if he did not practice, his efforts were more successful than those of his classmates, young Sergei grew lazier and lazier. In the end he did nothing at all, showed a marked preference for shirking his […]

Isaac Goldberg, a friend of George Gershwin, described the composer’s personality: HE was as simple, as unaffected, as modest, and as charming a youth as one could desire to meet. There was nothing about him that was forbidding. He wore his unprecedented celebrity as lightly as if it were a cane – that cane which […]

Title: Haunted Spooks (silent film soundtrack) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score (47 pages) Background:     Written by: H. M. Walker     Starring: Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Wallace Howe, Sammy Brooks, William Gillespie, Mark Jones, Gaylord Lloy, Sam Lufkin, Ernest Morrison, Dee Lampton          Directed by: Alfred J. Goulding & Hal Roach     Film released: […]

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 […]

Conductor Malcolm Sargent on Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony: A frightening symphony. For a symphony to be frightening is perhaps a good thing. Here we have the complete testament of a man who, in his seventies, looks back on the human sufferings of his time. I never conduct the Sixth without feeling that I am walking […]