Often at the end of the day Gaby [Debussy’s lover] would discover that they had a little money left over and then they would go out to a café, or circus, or to watch a billiards match. Debussy was very fond of the game. At the circus he loved the clowns and was as excited […]

Mozart’s sense of mischief is evident in his behaviour at a performance of The Magic Flute.  Thisis from a letter to his wife Oct 8 & 9 1791: … (1) had a box [in the theatre] this evening and applauded everything vigorously; but He, that Know-it-all, proved to be a real Bavarian; I couldn’t stay […]

“Tuning a piano also tunes the brain, say researchers who have seen structural changes within the brains of professional piano tuners.” BBC News, 29 August 2012. Click here to view article  

“Beauty will save the world.” – The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Theatre director Herbert Wernicke has taken six of Bach’s Cantatas dealing with the frailty of the human condition and presented them in a staging of mundane human activities.  Albrecht Puhlmann, the general director of Stuttgart Opera, states that “From the woman with the baby to the coffin being carried out, life and death is being […]

Title: A Light Rises in the Darkness Psalm 111 (112): 4-9 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part.

Haydn was in London in 1791 when he performed in a concert led by Johann Salomon (a violinist/composer).   Salomon played the first violin and led the orchestra, and Haydn sat at the harpsichord, keeping the band together by an occasional chord or two, as the practice then was. Great composers have not always been […]

British conductor Thomas Beecham was not too impressed with early recording technology (the gramophone): It was put to him that for people who lived in remote districts, far from orchestral concerts, the gramophone was an alternative: "It is no alternative to this," he said, waving his arm towards the hall, where the orchestra was waiting […]

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821

Make your musical lines as long as possible. Rachmaninoff said, “Small musician, small ideas; big musician, big ideas.” After an artist has played a program many times he can soar so high above the music that he conceives the whole event in one arch of sound. Make each phrase prepare for the next; make many […]