Finding the voice of PiazzollaI was writing symphonies, chamber music, string quartets. But when Nadia Boulanger analyzed my music, she complained that she couldn’t find any Piazzolla in there. She could find Ravel and Stravinsky, maybe Bela Bartok or Hindemith, but never Piazzolla. The truth is I was ashamed to tell her that I was a tango musician, that […]
Prokofiev is evictedSergey Prokofiev was once evicted from his apartment for playing the same chord 218 times. A tally was kept by the downstairs tenant. Source: Lawrence, Christopher (2001) Swooning. Sydney: Random House, p.69.
Baroque they are notBetween 1910 and 1938 the Austrian violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler produced some arrangements of works by Boccherini, Martini, Couperin, Vivaldi and Porpora. They were positively achieved by the crticis. In 1935, Kreisler revealed that there were not arrangements at all, but in fact works which he had written from scratch. Suddenly critic’s attitudes to the […]
Appreciating beautyMusic exists only in a passing of time, racing past us like the mid-nineenth-century trains Ruskin so hated. It is utterly non-fixed, and to focus on one moment is to destroy the whole. It is a forest that we have to pass through, not a single tree that we can contemplate or capture. But, if […]
Inspiration exists“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” -Pablo Picasso Cited at WikiQuote
Through teaching we teach ourselves“It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.” —Henri Frederic Amiel. Swiss philosopher, poet & critic. H. F. Amiel, Amiel’s Journal, trans. H. Ward, London, Macmillan […]
Abstraction XIITitle: Abstraction XII Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score Sample:
The importance of good textsMozart described the importance of good operatic texts in a letter regarding The Abduction from the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail) in a letter to his father in 1781: …the Poesie is totally in tune with the character if this stupid, coarse, and malicious Osmin [the servant character] – and I am well aware […]
Rachmaninoff on the culminating point in performanceThis culmination may be at the end or in the middle, it may be loud or soft; but the performer must know how to approach it with absolute calculation, absolute precision, because, if it slips by, then the whole construction crumbles, and the piece becomes disjointed and scrappy and does not convey to the listener […]
Waste not, want notWhile attending school in Lüneberg, J. S. Bach used to travel to Hamburg (50km away) to hear the organist of the Catharinekirche: J. A. Reincken. Marpurg describes how Bach, returning almost penniless to Lüneberg, once rested outside an inn; how someone threw two herring heads out on the rubbish heap; how Bach – a Thuringian, to […]
