ARTICLES & PAPERS: PROGRAM NOTES:

“What we play is life.” Louis Armstrong, Jazz musician Cited at: Satchmo, “Louis Armstrong Quotes and Tributes.” https://www.satchmo.com/louisarmstrong/quotes.html, accessed 6 September 2021.

“The advice I am giving always to my students is above all to study the music profoundly.  Because the music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees, or the contrary.” Andrés Segovia, guitarist.  Cited in: Cited in: Kimball, K., Petersen, R., Johnson, K. […]

A letter from the conductor Leopold Stokowski to Sylvan Levin gives an insight into his sense of humour: Caro Maestro Illustre, Now that you have not a thing to do!!!!! Do you think you would have time to do me a favor and time the whole of Parsifal without cuts?  I suggest you do this […]

Title: Ode II Composer: Greg Smith Performer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: MP3 recording     Related products:     – Ode II (PDF score) SAMPLE:

Title: Abstraction XII Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score Sample:  

Title: Haunted Spooks (silent film soundtrack) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score (47 pages) Background:     Written by: H. M. Walker     Starring: Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Wallace Howe, Sammy Brooks, William Gillespie, Mark Jones, Gaylord Lloy, Sam Lufkin, Ernest Morrison, Dee Lampton          Directed by: Alfred J. Goulding & Hal Roach     Film released: […]

“If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), American poet.

The conductor Stokowski was co-conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.  He was rehearsing his own orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.  The orchestra, however, was used to playing Ravel’s exuberant orchestration. Charles O’Connell recalled: “In the midst of the rehearsal, one of the second violinists busied himself practising the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, which […]

Schumann once attended a masquerade during the carnival of 1830, in company with his friend Rosen, for the purpose of paying some attention to a pretty but otherwise insignificant girl.He knew that she would be present at the ball, and, as a pretext for approaching her, put a poem in his pocket.Fortune favored him: he […]