1 1 MUSIC TRANSCRIPTION Greg Smith is a freelance Australian composer and pianist. Greg completed his Bachelor of Music with Honors Class I and a University Medal at the University of Newcastle in 2001. He then graduated from a Master of Creative Arts, majoring in Performance Practice Issues in Russian Piano Music from the same […]

People often begged him to play a little air on the violin, but he refused great lords and his fellow de-bauchers alike.  The only person who succeeded in making him play was the Marshal de Grammont.  He had a footman called La Lande who later became one of the best violinists in Europe.  After a […]

The public concert, as an institution, dates from England from the Restoration period [from the 1660s]; previously music, unless ecclesiastical or dramatic in character, had been essentially the art of a small circle.  The largess of aristocratic patronage and the profits of publication were the composers’ rewards.  But with the middle of the seventeenth century […]

The artist who does not feel completely satisfied by elegant lines, by harmonious colours, and by a beautiful succession of chords does not understand the art of music. — Camille Saint-Saëns Cited in Milton Cross David Ewan, Encyclopedia of Great Composers and Their Music, volume 2. Double Day, 1969, p.819.

The theme to the comedy series The Office is based on the 1967 song “Handbags and Gladrags” (written by Mike d’Abo). It was arranged by Big George in 2000.

Nadyezhda Filaretovna von Meck was Tchaikovsky’s patroness.  In March 1877 she wrote of the effect of Tchaikovsky’s music on her.  The work being described is a Marche Funèbre on a theme from Oprichnik (this work is now lost).    It is so superb that, as I had hoped, it elevates and transports me into a […]

Conductor and pianist Seymour Lipkin (born 1928) recalled piano lessons with his teacher, Bohemian-born pianist Rudolf Serkin: He said so many memorable things to me that I continue to pass on to my students.  A few examples: “The worst crime you can commit as an artist is to bore your listeners”; for another, “People who […]

Logically, a hunch makes as much sense as saying, horses have tails; therefore, all tails have horses.”  But in the zany world of films you don’t explain hunches — you just live and die by them. Frank Capra (1971) The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography.  Macmillan, p. 123. 

Sondheim is a lover of games, and collects antique ones (many were destroyed in a fire that swept through the lower floors of the house in 1995). He has a passion for murder mysteries, puzzles (he once spent 18 months devising cryptic crosswords for New York magazine), word play and anagrams. His own name, he […]

Ravel, touring America in 1928, was approached by George Gershwin for composition lessons.  Ravel refused, stating “you would only lose your own spontaneity and end up by writing bad Ravel!” Cited in:  James, Burnett (1983) Ravel: His Life and Times.  New York: Midas Books, p.120