“True music … must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.” — George Gerswhin Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart (1926) The Gershwin Years.  Garden City: Double Day.

“When teaching, light a fire, don’t fill a bucket.” – Dan Snow, television presenter. Cited at QuotationsBook  

“…the nature of music is inherently social. Blackburn argues, ” … we need to remind ourselves that music in itself does not exist. Despite evidence to the contrary (scores, analytical charts, music stores, CD shelves, etc.) music exists only in performance. … It is therefore a social and political act.” The performance of music corresponds […]

Hannes was not always solemn – far from it!  He could be as full of fun and wild pranks as any boy.  With Christian he worked out a scheme which they both found hugely entertaining.  They would knock at the door of a house where, perhaps a century before, some illustrious citizen of Hamburg had […]

Title: Abstraction XIII Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score     Related products:     – Abstraction XIII (mp3)  

“There is something very satisfying about composing…you are letting yourself go, you write in a kind of trance, feeling you are doing very well. The next day you are quite capable of seeing that it wasn’t all that good, but that doesn’t matter so much.” Leonard Bernstein, 1971 Cited at: Leonard Bernstein (@LennyBernstein) “There’s something […]

Phrases have their own topography—they move forward with the line but also remain wedded to the ground with each change of harmony, and this is where the battle lies, why each piece of music grapples with its own destructive potential, why beauty is never what it appears to be. — Simon Tedeschi S. Tedeschi, Fugitive, […]

If a man teaches composition in a university, how can he not be a composer? He has worked hard, learned his craft. Ergo, he is a composer. A professional. Like a doctor. But there is that doctor who opens you up, does exactly the right thing, closes you up—and you die. He failed to take […]

In the late nineteenth-century, some quite curious mechanical inventions were created to deal with the body with relation to pianists and conductors.    The following is an account of a presentation by T. L. Southgate on The Physiology of Pianoforte Piano. The paper presented was written by W. Macdonald Smith.  This account appeared in the […]

“Pavarotti is like someone who has swalled a Stradivarious.” – Peter Ustinov Cited in: Jarski, Rosemarie (2005) Great British Wit.  London: Ebury Press, p. 203.