Title: One Week (silent film soundtrack) Composer: Greg Smith Performer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: MP3 score (22:24) BACKGROUND: Film: Directors: Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton Starring: Buster Keaton, Joe Roberts, Sybil Seely Date of release: 1920 Synopsis: A newly wed couple receive a generous gift of a house of their own. There’s […]

Ravel’s style — elegant, and refined — was highly influenced by eighteenth classicism (e.g., Mozart) and the early French keyboard composers (e.g., Couperin). Stravinsky once described Ravel as a “Swiss watchmaker”, due to Ravel’s attention to detail. Ravel wrote: “I never put down a work until I have made absolutely certain that there is nothing […]

A violoncello piccolo is a violin-sized instrument tuned like a cello.  It is held horizontally, slung from a from a strap over the shoulder lika guitar.  Some of Bach’s cantatas specifically written for this instrument.  It is possible that Bach wrote the cello suites for the instruments (no instrument was specified on the manuscripts). Source: […]

Some curious answers for the Society of Arts published in the Musical Times (English Journal), July 1888: The Examiner’s report on the papers worked by the candidates in the recent Theoretical Examinations of the Society of Arts shows some very curious facts. … Mistakes in spelling have not been accredited with loss to to the […]

“Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them.” – Joseph Joubert, French writer Joubert, J. (1983) The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection. Translated by Paul Auster. San Francisco: North Point Press, p. 76.

The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from […]

American pianist Seymour Lipkin, a student of Rudolf Serkin recalled a performance of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata Back in the 1970s I gave a recital at Curtis at Mr. Serkin’s invitation.  I was playing the Hammerklavier in those years.  Why, in my right mind … I should never have … but I did.  There, sitting in […]

Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and–if at all possible–speak a few sensible words. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Goethe, Johann (translated by Frederick Ungar & Heinz Goethe, Johann W., Frederick Ungar, and Heinz Norden). Goethe’s world view : presented in his reflections […]

“The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.” – Henry Miller, American writer and painter

“It’s good! Awfully emotional! Too emotional, but I love it…” Edward Elgar on his own Violin Concerto Jeremy Pound, “First Violin”, BBC Music Magazine, October 2010, p. 36.