Composer: Johannes Brahms Text: Klaus Groth Title: Wie melodien zieht es mir (Like melodies it pulls me), op. 105, no. 1 Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:  

Ravel’s infamous Boléro was somewhat created by chance: Shortly before Ravel left for America, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein had asked him for a ballet to be based on orchestrations of parts of Albéniz’s Iberia. To this he agreed; with so much on his plate he was not anxious to undertake further commitments for wholly original composition. […]

“Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, […]

American composer Steve Reich on his compositional process: When I compose, I notice I’m the only one in the room. (laughs) I tend to be a somewhat self-critical person. I use my emotional faculties to judge whether I want to hear something again. Basically I have no one in mind except pleasing myself. And my […]

Rachmaninoff once urged Horowitz to go for long walks.  “If you don’t walk, your fingers will not run.” Abram Chasins, “The Return of Horowitz”, The Saturday Evening Post, October 22, 1966, p.102-3. Cited in: Gerig, Reginald (1974) Famous Pianists and Their Technique.  Washington: Robert V. Luce, p.307.

The following appeared in the Musical Times in 1913: An amusing story, for the truth of which we can vouch, comes to us from Toronto. An organist had drawn up the order of a Sunday service, and it was in type ready for printing, when the death of an important personage made a change necessary. […]

Reporters described Sergei Rachmaninoff on a concert tour (c. 1940): His punctuality is a legend.  If a reporter asks for two minutes of his time, two minutes and no more are given.  Consequently he arrives at a concert hall on the dot of 8 and goes on the stage precisely at 8:30.  If the concert […]

Title: Through the Long Night Composer: Greg SmithText: Edward Carpenter Instrumentation: TTBBProduct medium: PDF score

“He accomplishes enormous difficulties, but so quietly, so smoothly and with such constant delicacy and refinement that the listener is not sensible of their real magnitude.  It is the exquisite delicacy, with the liquid mellowness of his tone, and the pearly roundness of his passages of rapid articulation which are the peculiar features of his […]

“My earnest desire is to compose music which would make all my beloved fellow countrymen feel quite at home, and lead no-one to allege that I strutted around in borrowed plumes.” – Mikhail Glinka Cited in Jerremy Nicholas, “Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka”, Classic FM, April 2012, p.35.