“There’s a phrase I’ve often heard from audience members at popular musicals (but, oddly, never anywhere else): the show, they’ll say, “really took me out of myself”.  They are saying something basic and profound about the ecstasy of art, the act of being taken out of one’s normal state to a different level of being.  […]

“Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the world’s supreme good.” – Pascal Blaise, French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. C. Prendergast, A history of modern French literature: from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017, p. 237.

Gustav Mahler recalled: After an illness, Bruckner was ordered by his doctor to take a daily hip-bath.  Loath to waste time, he would take music paper and compose while in the tub.  While absorbed in his work one day, the mother of Rudolf Kryzanowski, one of his pupils, knocked at the door.  “Come in!” called […]

An art gathers new material usually by an original rejection of old formulae, a gesture of negation. At the beginning, this gesture is conscious, defiant, it lacks any other reason for existence than the very healthy one that dogma is death. In the turmoil of growth and expansion, this negation and denial loses its identity […]

Title: Du bist die Ruh (You are my Rest) (Op. 59, No. 3) Composer: Franz Schubert Arranger: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Trombone and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:

Interviewer: So many children hate to take music lessons. Can you understand this? Rubinstein: Oh, yes, I was one of them. You see, music lessons mean always this horrible dictatorial attitude of the professors. They slap four fingers and aarh; they shout at you: “Can’t you learn that? You must practice scales!” I mean, it […]

Is Ringo Starr the best drummer in the world? He’s not even the best drummer in the Beatles. Reporter and John Lennon. Source: Jarski, Rosemarie (2005) Great British Witt.  London: Ebury Press, p.257.

I have often made the point in masterclasses that students should not listen to lots of recordings of a piece they are learning. I’m always a little horrified when I hear a student say, “My teacher told me to learn the Chopin G minor Ballade, so I went to the library and took out eight […]

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

Vaughan Williams gave a broadcast talk on Bach entitled “Bach the Great Bourgeois.” It was later published in The Listener. Vaughan Williams, who was involved in performances of works such as Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion as part of the Leith Hill Festival, offered some insight in contemporary approaches to Bach performance: WHEN I was a […]