A specialized skill set

“You know I’m a useless kind of man apart from my music.”
– Tchaikovsky
Cited in: Hanson, Lawrence and Elisabeth (1965) Tchaikovsky: A New Study of the Man and His Music.  London: Cassell & Company, p.179.


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Mighty Like a Moose
Title: Mighty Like A Moose (silent film soundtrack) Composer Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score (34 pages) Background:     Written by: Charley Chase & H. M. Walker     Starring: Charley Chase, Vivien Oakland, Gale Henry, Charles Clary, Ann Howe, Malcolm Denny     Directed by: Leo McCarey     Film released: 1926 SAMPLE:
Education and research
Education & research services in the fields below are offered both: – online – face to face Skill areas: – Aural and harmony – Analysis – Music history – Piano tuition How can Emotemuse help you? – Tuition – Research and analysis Contact   THE CRAFT OF THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE Greg Smith completed a Bachelor […]
Music is richer than words
“If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression. Music is something autonomous and much richer. Music begins where the possibilities of language end. That is why I write music.” Jean Sibelius, in an interview with Berlingske Tidende, 10th June 1919. Cited at: www.sibelius.fi […]
Reich on modernism and tonality
American composer Steve Reich on Schoenberg and his compositional style: Schönberg is the beginning of the death of German Romanticism. It’s about deciding that we didn’t need harmonic organization. But this was music for a small cadre of listeners. I think Schönberg said, “In fifty years, the postman will whistle my tunes.” Well, it’s been […]
Music which never leaves
‘”Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty.  Magical music never leaves the memory.” Sir Thomas Beecham Speech, c.1950, quoted in The Sunday Times, 16 September 1962
Blue Flemingo
Title: Blue Flemingo Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score SAMPLE:
Art and humanity
“Writing and performing an opera, creating any work of art in a world of violence and ease, hunger and obesity, could seem to be an act of private withdrawal. But art isn’t about itself, it’s about how men relate to the world and each other … Asking artists to keep politics out of art is […]
Brahms’ post-concert adventure
Brahms was invited to the family of one of his students, Fräulein von Meyensbug, in Detmol : The Meysenbug ladies proved very prim and conventional. Brahms was ill at ease. He was so afraid of shocking his aristocratic hostesses that he hardly knew what to say or how to behave. Their young nephew Carl, however, […]
The subject of art
Abstract art is only painting. And what’s so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint. It is the object which aroused the artist, […]
Growing up in a bell tower
Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů was born and spent most of his childhood in a church tower in Polička, on the borders of Bohemia and Moravia.  Martinů recalled that the panoramic view encapsulated “the vast and boundless space I am always searching for in my music.” Source: Calum MacDonald, “Bohuslav Martinů”, BBC Music, August 2009, p.44.