“Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.” — John Wooden, American basketball player. Wooden, John (1988) Modern Practical Basketball.  Macmillan, p.234

“You know I’m a useless kind of man apart from my music.” – Tchaikovsky Cited in: Hanson, Lawrence and Elisabeth (1965) Tchaikovsky: A New Study of the Man and His Music.  London: Cassell & Company, p.179.

“As musicians, we are already doing something for the world … We make it more flowing? … Through music”. Pianist Lang Lang Shirley Apthorp, “Piano Man”, The Australian, May 14 2011.

Title: Merlin the Wizard Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Duet Level: 2 Product medium: PDF score

“I do not choose my listeners. What I mean is, I never write for my listeners. I think about my audience, but I am not writing for them. I have something to tell them, but the audience must also put a certain effort into it. But I never wrote for an audience and never will […]

Conductor James Levine on Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin: Eugene Onegin is very special, an incredibly successful piece; there is nothing quite like it. The character of Tatyana is so extraordinary. Tchaikovsky absorbed certain things from Pushkin’s original poem, and then composed his own opera, which of course angered some other great Russian artists, like Stanislavsky […]

(i) Moderato (C major) (ii) Andantino (A-flat major) (iii) Allegro moderato (f minor) (iv) Moderato (c-sharp minor)/ (v) Allegro vivace (f minor) (vi) Allegretto (A-flat major) In 1929, Oscar Bie reflected on Schubert: That face! . . . It is the face of a teacher, but not of a strict one. The hair curls about […]

“Nothing can be more useful to a man than the determination not to be hurried.” – Henry David Thoreau

After Robert Schumann was admitted to a mental assuming in 1854, Johannes Brahms stayed with Robert’s wife, Clara Schumann to support herself and her eight children. Although Robert’s sad condition was always present in the minds of those who loved him, there was occasional happy times at the Schumann’s home in Düsseldorf.   On the […]

“Blessed are the weird people–poets, misfits, writers, mystics…painters & troubadours–for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.” — Jacob Nordby Jacob Nordby (2016) Blessed are the Wierd: A Manefesto for Creatives, Boise: Manifesto, Publishing House, p.8.