Hannes was not always solemn – far from it!  He could be as full of fun and wild pranks as any boy.  With Christian he worked out a scheme which they both found hugely entertaining.  They would knock at the door of a house where, perhaps a century before, some illustrious citizen of Hamburg had […]

Title: Peace is what I leave you Text: John 14:27 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.  — Leonard Bernstein, 25 November 1963 Christopher Buchenholz, “An Artist’s Response to Violence”, Leonard Bernard Office, https://leonardbernstein.com/about/humanitarian/an-artists-response-to-violence. Accessed 18 March 2022.

This 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 […]

The Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev was evicted from his lodgings on several occasions on account of the noise which accompanied his endeavors. Eventually he stopped composing at the piano, using it only to test certain harmonic combinations. This practice proved adequate until his work was interrupted one day by the arrival of a policeman: “You […]

“The work of the individual still remains the spark that moves mankind forward.” – Igor Sikorsky, Russian aviator

Vaughan Williams studied composition with Dr. Hubert Parry at the Royal College of Music, London. Vaughan Williams recalled: Many … entirely misunderstood Parry; they were deceived by his rubicund bonhomie and imagined that he had the mind, as he had the appearance, of a country squire. The fact is that Parry had a highly nervous […]

Sometimes, I’ll work through it, and sometimes, you know, you might have to make a couple of test bottles or test wines, and it helps you get closer.  But if I don’t stop, I might get on the machine here and make five tracks, but I know that they’re not really worth anything.  I’m just […]

“Music had stirred him like that.  Music had troubled him many times.  But music was not articulate.  It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey.

“It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet