When Spanish cellist Pablo Casals was in his seventies, he retired from the concert stage and lived in Prades, Southern France. Casals began each day by playing from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier on the piano (1), then heading out for a walk with his German shepherd, cocking an ear for birdsong and saluting the snow-capped peak […]

“The possibilities of creative effort connected with the subconscious mind are stupendous and imponderable. They inspire one with awe.” – Napoleon Hill, American author Quotations Book  

“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, […]

“We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.” — David Lynch

This will be our response to violence To make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.  – Leonard Bernstein.

An artist groping his way forward can open a secret door and never understand that this door hid an entire world. So it is that, if a man who passes for the father of a school, because he determined it, one day shrugs his shoulders and renounces it, that by no means discredits the school. […]

“Polls of various musical personalities (but not me) in the Times about who’s underrated and who’s overrated.  Naturally Vivaldi is deemed overrated in the light of Bach.  Since everyone knows he’s overrated.  I’d have said he’s the most underrated of overrated composers.” Ned Rorem (2000) Lies: A Diary 1986-1999.  Cambridge: MA: Da Capo Press, p.82. […]

In modern life electricity plays a great part.  Sometimes it is used destructively – sometimes creatively – but there is another power which is like electricity, only far more subtle and penetrating.  This power is all-pervading.  It is omnipresent.  If we understood this power we would know the secret of the magical influence of music.  […]

Title: A Swan (Ein Schwan), op. 25, no.2 Composer: Edvard Grieg Arranger: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:

Title: Abstraction XComposer: Greg SmithPerformer: Greg Smith (7 August 2010)Instrumentation: PianoProduct medium: MP3Related products:– Abstraction X (PDF score)