Title: Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble (setting ii) Text: Psalm 90 (91): 1-2, 10-15. R. v.15 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: SATB score and partSAMPLE:

“There can be no music without idealogy … We, as revolutionaries, have a different conception of  music from the composers of other [non Soviet-Russia] countries.  Lenin himself said the “Music is a means of unifying people”.  It is not a leader of the masses, perhaps, but certainly an organising force … I think an artist […]

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 […]

When Brahms was young, he had to play in rowdy taverns to help support his family. Dance music was what the people in the taverns wanted, and Hannes would sometimes relieve the monotony by improvising variations on the popular waltzes of the day.  But what finally made his work endurable was the discovery that while […]

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 […]

“I did not want to describe emotions or scenes through music. I wanted to be at a certain distance from the story and the characters, and I wanted to be in between the actual story and what we see on the screen, and the viewers, in terms of writing the music.” — Joe Hisaishi T. […]

“…all talent, all application will not suffice if one’s whole life is not directed towards being a mediator of great thoughts and feelings. Every deed, yes, every thought leaves its trace on the personality. One must live a life of purity in every detail, even down to the morsel one is putting into one’s mouth. […]

There is a crack, a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in. Leonard Cohen, “Anthem Related: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”: The story of Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”

“Talent labors, genius creates.” Florestan (one of Schumann’s characters) Robert Schumann,Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Muisker  (Leipzig, 1854), IV.  Cited in Weiss, Piero & Taruskin, Richard (2008) Music in the Western World: A History in Documents.  California: Thomson, p. 306.

“Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.  Although the spirit be not master of that which it creates through music, yet it is blessed in this creation, which, like every creation of art, is mightier than the artist. — Beethoven Edwards, Tyron (1891) A Dictionary of Thoughts.  New York: Cassell Publishing […]