Vaughan Williams was commissioned to revise the hymn book of the Anglican Church: Hymns Ancient and Modern. This was amounted to a huge task, but beneficial to his compositional outlook. The study of folk music to ensure the “best” versions of tunes was stressed the importance of musical activity in all spheres of music. He […]

Title: Abstraction X Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF scoreRelated products: – Abstraction X (MP3) SAMPLE:

“Face the facts of being who you are, for that is what changes what you are.” Søren Kierkegaard, Danish writer. Cited at QuotationsBook  

Rachmaninoff played his Third Concerto in January 1909 in New York, conducted by Gustav Mahler. Rachmaninoff recalled the rehearsal: Suddenly, Mahler, who had conducted this passage a tempo, tapped his desk: “Stop!  Don’t pay any attention to the difficult bowing marked in your parts. … Play the passage like this,” and he indicated a different […]

An allemande is a stately processional couple dance. The dances formed lines of couples, extended their hands, and moved forward and backward throughout the ballroom. It was a common stylised dance in baroque music. Johann Mattheson described it in 1739: Now the allemande is a broken, serious, and well constructed harmony, which is the image […]

Title: The precepts of the Lord give joy to my heart Text: Psalm 18 (19): 8-11. R. c. Jn 6:68 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:    

Sergey Prokofiev was once evicted from his apartment for playing the same chord 218 times.  A tally was kept by the downstairs tenant. Source: Lawrence, Christopher (2001) Swooning.  Sydney: Random House, p.69.

Title: The just will live in the presence of the Lord (Setting II) Text: Psalm 14 (15):2-5 (setting ii) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:

From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death—all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes […]

“The experience of beauty … consists of finding a spiritual value (truth, happiness, moral ideals) at home in a material setting (rhythm, line, shape, structure) and in such a way that, while we contemplate the object, the two seem inseparable.” – John Armstrong, The Secret Power of Beauty.