Igor Stravinsky’s Circus Polka: For a Young Elephant to be performed by young elephants (a collaboration with American choreographer George Balanchine. It ended up being performed by older elephants – the main star being Big Modoc (41 years of age). Each elephant wore a join pink tutu. Source: Dixon, Gavin “Igor Stravinsky’s pachyderm polka”, Classic […]

Beethoven on the development of the piano as an instrument in its own right: There is no doubt that so far as the manner of playing it is concerned, the pianoforte is still the least studied and developed of all instruments; often one thinks that one is merely listening to a harp.  And I am […]

Ask him to write a song, though, and he’ll likely turn you down on the basis that he has a problem with “any form of authority, and the authority that is put upon you of writing a song”. “Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight…” he says. “It’s always the same bloody structure. I end up […]

“There is hardly any treatise which could be too learned for me. I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly called erudition. Yet from my childhood I have striven to understand what the better and wiser people of every age were driving at in their works. Shame on an artist who does not […]

“I think that one way toward a more intelligent and involved appraisal is through a connection with the pieces, and that one way to develop that connection is to talk about what the pieces mean to people who have spent a lot of time with them: the content, if you will. This approach can also […]

While in London, Chopin frequently gave performances at soirées and matinées where he performed Nocturnes, Waltzes, Mazurkas and the Berceuse George Hogarth reported in the Daily News (10 July 1848): 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 […]

“Writing music is seventy-five per cent an intellectual activity.  This effort is often more pleasant for me than having a rest.” Conversation with Ravel, recalled by Robert de Fragny, Echo liberté, 7 November 1950. Cited in: Nichols, Roger (1987) Ravel Remembered.  London: Faber & Faber., p. 61.

Title: Abstraction XIV Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score Related products: – Abstraction XIV (mp3)This item is currently not in print SAMPLE:

1In 1994, Dr. Masaru Emoto began taking photos of ice crystals. What he found was that environmental surroundings had different effects on the nature of the crystals. The crystals formed at Mt. Fuji, for example, had a different structure to those found at the Rocky Mountains. He then extended this study to include a study […]

James Huneker, a critic with the New York Courier, wrote about the impact of Brahms’ music on him: Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind, and you hear the rustling of wings – wings of great terrifying monsters; hippogrifs of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces […]