Irish pianist and composer George Alexander Osburn (1806-93) was a professor at the Royal Academy of Music and a director of the Philharmonic Society. One of his most popular compositions was La Pluie de Perles (The Shower of Pearls). At a fashionable party, at which he arrived very late, he was invited to play, and […]

“I do not choose my listeners. What I mean is, I never write for my listeners. I think about my audience, but I am not writing for them. I have something to tell them, but the audience must also put a certain effort into it. But I never wrote for an audience and never will […]

“…Moon, a 20-year veteran of the Philadelphia Inquirer before he left to write his new book, “1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die,” believes the biggest difference between old reviews and reviews now is that in the past, the critic’s job was to give readers a deeper sense of the work. But blogs’ rise has […]

”You see,” he said, ”I have a very substantial program, and after a substantial program, you can’t play a substantial encore. You play a little … ” at this, he strummed the air with his fingers, tinkling an imaginary piano. ”It is,” he said, ”anticlimactic.” Clyde Haberman, “3,500 Japanese Applaud Horowtiz for 14 Minutes”, The […]

Title: Ganymed (Op. 19, No. 3)Composer: Franz SchubertArranger: Greg SmithInstrumentation: Cello and pianoProduct medium: PDF score and part Sample:

“The secret of the vital power of Tchaikovsky’s music lies in the fact that there is virtually not a single province of his music–from the gems of Russian chamber music that issued from his pen to his greatest operas or symphonic poems–in which the appeal and effect of the music was less than in any […]

“What comes from the heart, goes to the heart.” — Samuel Coleridge Taylor, English poet, critic and philosopher. Coleridge, Samuel (1856) Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton. London: Chapman and Hall, page xlv

Now the nature of man consists in this, that his will strives, is satisfied and strives anew, and so on for ever. Indeed, his happiness and well-being consist simply in the quick transition from wish to satisfaction, and from satisfaction to a new wish. For the absence of satisfaction is suffering, the empty longing for […]

Title: Abstraction VI Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part SAMPLE:

A recollection of the London Proms in 1936: The behavior of the Promenaders was more genteel in those days … there wasn’t the same degree of shouting as now.  During the famous hornpipe in Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs people tapped with their umbrellas and sticks, rather than stamping.  As the applause went […]