Title: God mounts his throne (Setting II) Text: Psalm 46 (47): 2-3, 6-7, 8-9 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and organ Related products: – God mounts his throne (Setting II) – SATB, brass, and organ Product medium: PDF score and part SAMPLE:

It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don’t happen. They must be constructed…. To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the […]

In a radio interview in 1937, Edward Elgar’s violinist friend William H. Reed described Elgar’s “distractions” while composing the violin concerto: I can never play the last movement without seeing the River Wye flowing past the meadow at Hereford where Sir Edward and I used to practise throwing a boomerang in our “off-time” between working […]

Franz Xaver Schnyder von Wartensee (1786-1868) was a composer who wanted lessons with Beethoven.  Beethoven would only look at his compositions. Schnyder often dined in the Mehlgrube, because he knew that Beethoven often went there at the same time in the evening. One lovely spring night Schnyder, on entering the restaurant, saw his friend Beethoven […]

Title: Lord, make us turn to you Text: Psalm 79 (80) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:

“Our modernized minds need to be musicalized. We have defied the intellect … and developed only half of man’s possibilities. There is no other human activity that asks for such a harmonious cooperation of “intellect” and “soul” as artistic creation, especially music.” Ernst Levy, Swiss composer, musicologist, pianist and conductor. Cited in: Kimball, K., Petersen, […]

Johannes Brahms could be incredibly rude, even to his friends. While playing a Beethoven sonata with a cellist friend one day, he applied his piano’s pedals with more enthusiasm than the friend had hoped. “Softer,” he pleaded, “I can’t hear my cello.” “You are lucky,” Brahms replied. “I can.” Source: N. Slonimsky, Book of Musical […]

Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, after running into some problems with his accommodation, was spending a cold November day in the Tiergarten, Berlin, in 1923. Throughout the course of the day, he was approached by Paul Bose to play Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. It began to rain. In Moscow it probably is snowing now, I thought absently, making […]

Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. […]

For me, one of the ultimate goals of a performance is to make pieces come across as something new, something unexpected and fresh. As soon as you start working with historical instruments, you are jeopardising this aspect. It is very difficult to get away from that; some performers manage it magically, but I don’t see […]