Ravel’s style — elegant, and refined — was highly influenced by eighteenth classicism (e.g., Mozart) and the early French keyboard composers (e.g., Couperin). Stravinsky once described Ravel as a “Swiss watchmaker”, due to Ravel’s attention to detail. Ravel wrote: “I never put down a work until I have made absolutely certain that there is nothing […]

Handel certainly liked to eat: A story is told of him that he once ordered up enough dinner for three. Noting that the servant dawdled about, Handel demanded why; the servant answered that he was waiting for the company to come, whereupon Handel stormed, in his famous broken English, “Den print up der tinner prestissimo. […]

Title: “Ombra mai fu” (from Serse) Composer: George Frederic Handel Arranger: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello quartet Product medium: PDF score and parts Sample:    

“The essential part of creativity is not being afraid to fail.” Edwin Land, American scientist and inventor.

“Any Broadway musical would be lucky to include a single number this good.” — Janet Maslin, in The New York Times on Alan Menken/Howard Ashman’s “Part of Your World,” from The Little Mermaid.  Darryn King, “Alan Menken: The Man Who Relaunched Disney’s Fortunes with Songs,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 July, 2016. http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/alan-menken-the-man-who-relaunched-disneys-fortunes-with-hit-songs-20160714-gq5o6v.html. Accessed 16 July 2016.

“Be ready when opportunity comes…. Luck is the time when preparation and opportunity meet.” — Roy D. Chapin Jnr., Chariman American motors association J. Roberts, The Big Book of Business Quotations: Over 1,400 of the Smartest Things Ever Said about Making Money, Simon and Schuster, 2016.

“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.” Matthew Arnold (poet and scholar), Preface to Literature and Dogma (1873 edition), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Literature_and_Dogma/Introduction, accesssed 29 August 2021.

“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.” – W. H. Auden, English Poet Auden, Wystan Hugh ‎(1988) The Complete Words of Auden, Princeton University Press, vol. 3, p. 251.

In 1908, after a period of intense period of immersion in English music due to his role as editor of Hymns Ancient and Modern, Vaughan Williams “came to the conclusion that I was lumpy and stodgy, had come to a dead-end, and that a little French polish would be of use to me.” (1) He […]

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” Derek Bok, American lawyer and educator Cited at: QuotationsBook