‘The following is an account of the conductor Hans von Bülow: Young composers whom Bülow decided to feature in the concerts were encouraged to present themselves at the rehearsals, and even to direct the orchestra themselves, whenever it was deemed to be helpful.  We can only admire the resourcefulness of the budding symphonist who, in […]

Make your musical lines as long as possible. Rachmaninoff said, “Small musician, small ideas; big musician, big ideas.” After an artist has played a program many times he can soar so high above the music that he conceives the whole event in one arch of sound. Make each phrase prepare for the next; make many […]

In mid-nineteenth century England, whistling was a common source of entertainment and as part of the general reception to a piece of music. An article in March 1854 in The Musical Times reported: We were sorry to hear the vile practice of whistling again carried on to some extent at the concert; were the well-meaning […]

Title: Abstraction XVII Composer: Greg Smith Performer: Greg Smith (April 2020) Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: MP3 recording Related products:– Abstraction XVII (PDF score)

Title: Love came down at Christmas Text: Christina Rossetti Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano solo Product medium: PDF score     Related products:     – Love came down at Christmas – SATB and piano     – Love came down at Christmas – Piano solo (MP3) hase_link id=”1673″ text=”Purchase” style=”button” color=”blue”] Samples:

Music exists only in a passing of time, racing past us like the mid-nineenth-century trains Ruskin so hated. It is utterly non-fixed, and to focus on one moment is to destroy the whole. It is a forest that we have to pass through, not a single tree that we can contemplate or capture. But, if […]

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” Derek Bok, American lawyer and educator Cited at: QuotationsBook

My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom … punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure …perhaps most crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. It can only ever, with […]

An art gathers new material usually by an original rejection of old formulae, a gesture of negation. At the beginning, this gesture is conscious, defiant, it lacks any other reason for existence than the very healthy one that dogma is death. In the turmoil of growth and expansion, this negation and denial loses its identity […]

The following appeared in the Musical Times, August 1890: We read that “a Saxon engineer has invented an automatic machine, the object of which is to save conductors the physical part of their duties. By pressing a button the apparatus, which is provided with an arm holding a conducting-stick, can be made to beat with the […]