Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) was a Belgian violinist, conductor and composer. Carl Flesch described him has “the most outstanding and individual violinist I have ever heard in my life.” Franck’s Violin Sonata, Chausson’s Poem and violin concerto, and Debussy’s string quartets were all dedicated to Ysaÿe. Ysaÿe wrote six sonatas for solo violin, each dedicated to […]

Music is a mysterious form of mathematics whose elements are derived from the infinite. Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes. There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in […]

Listening to music should always be an active process, and those who attend – pregnant verb – concerts, who listen, who respond, who treasure what they hear there, are musicians. They are the ones who do not let music wash over them like a bubble bath but who actively swim in the water. When vibrations […]

Title: “Ombra mai fu” (from Serse) Composer: George Frederic Handel Arranger: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello quartet Product medium: PDF score and parts Sample:    

Rodney Greenberg describes a side of George Gershwin’s “romantic side”: He wrote a little waltz-song, which he would sing and play to his current dating partner.  It was, in effect, what his friend Kitty Carlisle (who later married playwright Moss Hart) described as his “mating call”, because he left a blank space in the lyrics […]

Conductor and pianist Seymour Lipkin (born 1928) recalled piano lessons with his teacher, Bohemian-born pianist Rudolf Serkin: He said so many memorable things to me that I continue to pass on to my students.  A few examples: “The worst crime you can commit as an artist is to bore your listeners”; for another, “People who […]

“I am a great believer in luck and the harder I work the more of it I have.”— Stephen Leacock, Canadian author American Opinion, volume 2, issues 8-11, page 20

Feeling creates thought, men willingly agree; but they will not so willingly agree that thought creates feeling, though this is scarcely less true. — Nicolas Chamfort (Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort) S. Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations of Chamfort, Volume 2, Trans. E. Mathers, Golden Cockerel Press, 1926, p. 22.  

Title: The Blue Danube (op. 314) Composer: Johann Strauss Arranger: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part (32 pages) Sample:

An art gathers new material usually by an original rejection of old formulae, a gesture of negation. At the beginning, this gesture is conscious, defiant, it lacks any other reason for existence than the very healthy one that dogma is death. In the turmoil of growth and expansion, this negation and denial loses its identity […]