Composer: Alexandre Michel Gerard DesplatArranger: Greg SmithTitle: “Love Letter” from The Boys in the BoatInstrumentation: Piano solo Available from Sheet Music Direct and Sheet Music Plus

Make your musical lines as long as possible. Rachmaninoff said, “Small musician, small ideas; big musician, big ideas.” After an artist has played a program many times he can soar so high above the music that he conceives the whole event in one arch of sound. Make each phrase prepare for the next; make many […]

“Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.” – Leonard Bernstein, conductor, composer and pianist. Cited at QuotationsBook.  

In 1853, Brahms went on a tour of German cities with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi.  In the town of Celle, they were scheduled to play Beethoven’s Sonata in c minor (op. 30, no. 2): but it was found that the piano in the hall was tuned a half tone too low.  Reményi refused to […]

“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.

Haydn reached London in the opening days of 1791. He passed his first night at the house of Bland, the music publisher, at 45 High Holborn, which now, rebuilt, forms part of the First Avenue Hotel. Bland, it should have been mentioned before, had been sent over to Vienna by Salomon to coax Haydn into […]

Title: “October” from The Seasons, op. 37 bis Composer: Pytor Illich Tchaikovsky Arranger: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello quartet Product medium: PDF score and parts Sample:

Gershwin was often the life of a party, entertaining on the piano.  He said: “The trouble is, when I don’t play at a party I don’t have a good time.” Cited in: Greenberg, Rodney (2008) George Gershwin.  New York: Phaidon Press, p.47.

“I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained.” — Walt Disney L. Howes, “20 Lessons from Walt Disney on Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Chasing Your Dreams”, Forbes, 17 July 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/lewishowes/2012/07/17/20-business-quotes-and-lessons-from-walt-disney/?sh=4b3af9d44ba9.

Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, after running into some problems with his accommodation, was spending a cold November day in the Tiergarten, Berlin, in 1923. Throughout the course of the day, he was approached by Paul Bose to play Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. It began to rain. In Moscow it probably is snowing now, I thought absently, making […]