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Ravel’s style — elegant, and refined — was highly influenced by eighteenth classicism (e.g., Mozart) and the early French keyboard composers (e.g., Couperin). Stravinsky once described Ravel as a “Swiss watchmaker”, due to Ravel’s attention to detail. Ravel wrote: “I never put down a work until I have made absolutely certain that there is nothing […]

Johann Matthias Gesner was a colleague of Johann Sebastian Bach at St. Thomas’ School, Leipzig. He later worked on a commentary of the Roman author Quintilian (c. 35-100 A. D.). He included a comparison of Bach with the Classical lyre player: All these (outstanding achievements) … you would reckon trivial could you rise from the dead and […]

The relativity of all these key-colour associations was illustrated during a debate on the whole subject organised in London in 1886 by the Journal “Musical Opinion”. That section of the audience that maintained the definite existence of “key colour” by which it could aurally identify a key was submitted to a test, a well known […]

“The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.” – Sir Thomas Beecham Cited in: Jarski, Rosemarie (2005) Great British Wit.  London: Ebury Press, p. 198.

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all that there is to it. — Edward Albee, American playwright  Kolin, Philip (ed.) (1988) Conversations with Albee.  Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, p.35.

Beethoven, who is often bizarre and baroque, takes at times the majestic flight of an eagle, and then creeps in rocky pathways. He first fills the soul with sweet melancholy, and then shatters it by a mass of shattered chords. He seems to harbor together doves and crocodiles. A review of Beethoven’s First Symphony, Tablettes […]

“The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.” — Walt Disney L. Howes, “20 Lessons from Walt Disney on Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Chasing Your Dreams”, Forbes, 17 July 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/lewishowes/2012/07/17/20-business-quotes-and-lessons-from-walt-disney/?sh=4b3af9d44ba9, accessed 13 January 2022.

“There is also in this [nineteenth-century romantic] music an extraordinary sense of control over the passage of time; a moment will be held still as if suspended, and then released with a rush. Einstein has told us that time is relative, flexible and elastic; I have noticed these qualities whenever I have tried to play […]

Title: Prayer of Thanksgiving to the Trinity Text: St. Catherine’s Dialogue on Divine Providence Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano (easy)     Related products:     – Prayer of Thanksgiving to the Trinity

Tchaikovsky lived in a village Maidanovo.  When Tchaikovsky would go for works, he would also be hailed by groups of village children.  As Sofya Nikolayevna recalled: “They had discovered the times he went out and, as he always liked to gave them something, sweets or a coin, they used to lie in wait for him.” […]