You know what I think about metronome marks: they’re right for a single bar, like “roses, with a morning life”. Only there are “those” who don’t hear music and who take these marks as authority to hear it still less! But do what you please.
F. Lesure & N. Nichols (ed.), Debussy Letters, London, Faber, 1987, p. 305
— Debussy, Letter to Jacques Durand of 9 October 1915
Debussy on Metronome markings
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Stravinsky and Charlie ParkerThere is a story that Igor Stravinsky went to the New York jazz club Birdland one evening in 1951. Whispers went round that the great composer was in the house. When Charlie Parker came on with his quintet, he didn’t acknowledge Stravinsky in person, but seamlessly quoted The Firebird in his first number, the furiously […]
Your Ways, O Lord, are Love and Truth – Psalm 24 (25)TITLE: Your Ways, O Lord, are Love and Ruth TEXT: Psalm 24 (25):4-9 COMPOSER: Greg Smith INSTRUMENTATION: SATB and piano (unison verses) PRODUCT MEDIUM: PDF score and part SAMPLE:
Study music profoundly“The advice I am giving always to my students is above all to study the music profoundly. Because the music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees, or the contrary.” Andrés Segovia, guitarist. Cited in: Cited in: Kimball, K., Petersen, R., Johnson, K. […]
Joyous artArt that feels like a duty is probably bad art. But most of the art industry is geared towards foisting that kind of art on us. Bad art changes over the centuries far less than we think. Today’s theory-heavy video installations are often modern equivalents of pompous and moralising Victorian paintings. It’s the joyous, uninhibited […]
Music is richer than words“If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression. Music is something autonomous and much richer. Music begins where the possibilities of language end. That is why I write music.” Jean Sibelius, in an interview with Berlingske Tidende, 10th June 1919. Cited at: www.sibelius.fi […]
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Lullaby for BenTitle: Lullaby for Ben Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score
BeautyThe academic teaching on beauty is false. We have been misled, but so completely misled that we can no longer find so much as a shadow of a truth again. The beauties of the Parthenon, the Venuses, the Nymphs, the Narcisusses, are so many lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, […]
It’s Oh So QuietIn 1995, Bjork released a big band jazz cover of Betty Hutton’s 1948 hit “Blow a Fuse”. This was a cover of an Austrian song “Und jetzt ist es still” by Hans Lang and Erich Meder. Bjork said of the song: Isn’t that the best song you’ve heard for five years? In a way it […]