“Of course, almost anybody can memorize things, especially music. It’s like the ABCs and, for most, fun to do. I’ve taught music in middle school programs and have been surprised at the hefty repertoires of popular music that 12- to 16- year olds commit to memory. To boot, they knew when I made a mistake […]

Phrases have their own topography—they move forward with the line but also remain wedded to the ground with each change of harmony, and this is where the battle lies, why each piece of music grapples with its own destructive potential, why beauty is never what it appears to be. — Simon Tedeschi S. Tedeschi, Fugitive, […]

Title: Meditation I Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score SAMPLE:

When Handel travelled through Chester, on his way to Ireland, this year, 1741 (to give the first performance of Messiah), I was at the Public School in that city and very well remember seeing him [Handel] smoke a pipe, over a dish of coffee, at the Exchange Coffee House; for being extremely curious to see […]

Title: The Battle of the Somme (silent movie score) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: Full score (PDF download) – 80 pages     Related products:     – The Battle of the Somme (MP3) Background: In 1916 France was struggling to fend off German occupation.  It had become apparent that to break the stalemate Britain […]

Title: Golliwog’s Cakewalk (from Children’s Corner Suite) Composer: Claude Debussy Arranger: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello quartet Product medium: PDF score and parts Sample:

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. […]

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 […]

“The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.” —Agnes de Mille (1905-1993), American dancer and choreographer. Gardner, Kara Anne. Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance. United States, Oxford University Press, 2016.