With shifts in the commercial music industry away from smooth jazz, musicians are finding new niches for smooth jazz such as cruises. Twenty years ago, of course, smooth jazz wasn’t a code to be cracked so much as a wave to be caught. Like most species of pop, it felt ubiquitous and maybe a little […]

“Our happiness in this world depends on the affections we are able to inspire.” – Duchess Prazlin Cited at QuotationsBook

“I produce music as an apple tree produces apples.” — Camille Saint-Saëns Musical Heritage Review. Musical Heritage Society, volume 1, issues 13-18, p.47.

“When teaching, light a fire, don’t fill a bucket.” – Dan Snow, television presenter. Cited at QuotationsBook  

Title: Ode II Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Greg Smith Product medium: PDF score      Related products:     – Ode II (mp3) SAMPLE:

American jazz music is, in many ways, rooted in its “traditional” repertoire – the American “Songbook” of “standards”. There are, however musicians who emphasise the importance of a fresh approach: If jazz has a future, musicians like Matt Mayhall could help it get there. A lanky, bespectacled Reno native and graduate of Cal Arts, where […]

Puccini was a very sociable man, quote often putting this before his composing.  Even when he was working hard, he maintained an active social life: With the opening of the 1894-1895 season not far way, Puccini began steady work on La Bohème in Torre.  But he also needed a place to relax, so his “second […]

In the matter of practice, I never urge a student to work so many hours a day. One may be enough. The musician is like a painter, who frequently spends his time in looking at the work he has done, and in thinking what he will make of it, without so much as touching the […]

The Imperial Chapel Choir was founded in Vienna in 1498 and performed exclusively for the court.  Composers that worked with the choir included Musicians like Heinrich Isaac, Paul Hofhaimer, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Johann Joseph Fux, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonio Caldara, Antonio Salieri and Anton Bruckner.  Schubert was a chorister.  After the dissolution of the […]

Bernstein is intent on demonstrating that the inevitable doesn’t just happen. It comes from intense work. To show this, he restores a handful of Beethoven’s discarded sketches to the score so that we can hear how the Fifth would have sounded if Beethoven had retained his first (or second or 10th) thought. Some discarded passages […]