Meditation IIComposer: Greg SmithTitle: Meditation IIInstrumentation: PianoPerformer: Greg Smith (November 2010)Product medium: MP3 recording Your user agent does not support the HTML5 Audio element. Sheet music
A hunchLogically, a hunch makes as much sense as saying, horses have tails; therefore, all tails have horses.” But in the zany world of films you don’t explain hunches — you just live and die by them. Frank Capra (1971) The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. Macmillan, p. 123.
Music and identity“The more anonymous music is, the less likely people will be to feel attached it and to feel the need to support it. But when someone knows who you are, when you’re not just some disembodied vibrations in the air, they’re far more likely to stand behind you.” Isaac Schankler. “Beyond Sound and Science: Musicians, […]
Conducting glovesThe practice of wearing white gloves whilst conducting was common in the nineteenth century. The Musical times reported in July 1884 that: “A German conductor,” we are told, “in order that the public may be more deeply impressed with the feeling of grief intended to be produced by the Funeral March in Beethoven’s ‘Eroica Symphony,’ wears […]
Remembering J. S. BachCarl Philip Emanuel Bach recalled his father’s (Johann Sebastian) talents as a musician: The exact tuning of his own instruments, and of the whole orchestra, had his greatest attention. No one could tune and quill his instruments to his satisfaction; he did it all himself. The positioning of an orchestra he understood perfectly. He made good use of […]
Abstraction ITitle: Abstraction Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score Sample:
NAXOS and the recording industry“There was a time, not so long ago, that Klaus Heymann was accused of trying to destroy the classical music industry. That was around the same time that the world realized that Naxos, Heymann’s budget-record label, was not just another series of CDs in the bargain bin. At first, nobody really knew what to make […]
Life experience“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.” – William James, American philosopher and psychologist W. James, Essays in Pragmatism, United Kingdom, Free Press, 1970, p. 113.
Beethoven’s compositional processBeethoven was revising Fidelio when he wrote to Georg Freiedrich Treitschke (who was helping to revise the libretto) (1): Now, of course, everything has to be done at once; and I could composer something new far more quickly than patch up the old with something new, as I am now doing. For my custom when I […]
American Western Film Soundtracks“Morricone brought the electric guitar to the western. The great thing, though, about the electric guitar in the western is that there were no electric guitars, but somehow he did it so committedly that nobody ever questioned it. It was only much later people started to say, ‘How come there’s an electric guitar part there?’ […]