The academic teaching on beauty is false. We have been misled, but so completely misled that we can no longer find so much as a shadow of a truth again. The beauties of the Parthenon, the Venuses, the Nymphs, the Narcisusses, are so many lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, […]

John Barry did not get the chance to see any footage and he had not read any of Ian Fleming’s books when he was called in to work on the music for the first James Bond film, Dr No (1962), for which Monty Norman had originally been commissioned to write the score.  “I was just […]

Title: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Text: Psalm 21 (22): 8-9. 17-20. 23-24. R. v. 2 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and organ Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:

An artist groping his way forward can open a secret door and never understand that this door hid an entire world. So it is that, if a man who passes for the father of a school, because he determined it, one day shrugs his shoulders and renounces it, that by no means discredits the school. […]

With regard to counterpoint in Chopin’s music, you might be interested in the conversation that Chopin had not long before his death with the painter Eugène Delacroix. Delacroix was one of a handful of quite intimate friends of Chopin’s. In his diary, he mentions how he had picked up Chopin in a carriage, and they […]

Funnily, my deep conviction is that no idea or concept of true artistic importance can be imparted or transferred. The real things are those that you grow yourself in your own garden, without anyone overseeing. In that sense art is the land of absolute sole responsibility. There is nothing that cannot be challenged, but in […]

“Arensky is a man of remarkable gifts, but morbidly nervous and lacking in firmness—altogether a strange man.” Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in a letter to N. F. von Meck, Frolovskoe, July 2nd (14th), 1890. Cited in Modest Tchiakovsky, The Life & Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, np., Outlook Verlag, 2018, p. 477.

Cellist Walter Joachim spend some time in Calcutta, India. He recalled: “I bought a monkey with which to amuse myself. We played. He was sitting on my shoulders for hours when I was practising.” Joachim practised at least one or two movements of a Bach suite. “I started my day usually with Bach or a […]

By 1790, Haydn has become dissatisfied with life at Eszterhaza.  On 9th February he wrote: Well! I sit in my wilderness; forsaken, like some poor orphan, almost without human society; melancholy, dwelling on the memory of past glorious days.  Yes; past, alas! And who can tell when these happy hours may return?  Those charming meetings? […]

Johann Sebastian Bach married Anna Magdelena, 3rd December 1721. They married at home, by command of the Prince of Saxe-Weissenfels. It was Bach’s second marriage. Bach purchased a 264 quarts (about 250 litres) of wine, worth 84 thalers and 16 groschen (about one fifth of his annual salary). Siblin, Eric (2009) The Cello Suites.  Crows […]