Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. […]

The great singer, Cuzzoni, refused to sing an air of his the way he wished it. He seized her, and, dragging her to a window, threatened to throw her out, thundering, “I always knew you were a devil, but I’ll show you that I am Beelzebub, the prince of devils.” Hughes, Rupert (2004) The Love […]

“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. […]

The 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, […]

Title: Oration XIV Text: St. Gregory the Theologian Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score Samples:

“Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1849), Kavanagh, London: George Slater, p.49.  https://books.google.com.au/books?id=i8ENAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false, accessed 4 September 2021.

“All I have left is a long nose and a fourth finger out of practice.” Chopin, in Scotland, unable to visit his friend Julian in London because of ill health. Cited in: Zaluski, Iweo & Pamela (1993) The Scottish Autumn of Frederick Chopin. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, p.23.

The Polish composer Karol Szymanowski wrote of the French composer Maurice Ravel in 1925: Whether he writes a “Rapsodie espagnole”, “Mélodies grecques”, or the almost Viennese “La Valse”, he always remains one of the foremost fascinating representatives of the genius of his race.  He assembles all the fundamental elements of that most beautiful culture in […]

"Music is its own language, and, while that language is universal, it is also intensely personal. There are many ways of building communities around the arts. Sometimes you just do it very quietly – with a few people at a time." This blog outlines a touching correspondence between a family and pianist Andre Watts. "Creative […]

“Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?” – William Wordsworth, writer Cited at QuotationsBook