Igor Stravinsky’s Circus Polka: For a Young Elephant to be performed by young elephants (a collaboration with American choreographer George Balanchine. It ended up being performed by older elephants – the main star being Big Modoc (41 years of age). Each elephant wore a join pink tutu. Source: Dixon, Gavin “Igor Stravinsky’s pachyderm polka”, Classic […]

“The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” – Chinese proverb

Title: Abstraction XVIIComposer: Greg SmithInstrumentation: PianoPerformer: Greg Smith (October 2023)Product medium: MP3 audio Related products: – Abstraction XVIII (score) Sample:

As the talented student grows older he must seek within himself his interpretation.  Does he wish to know how to play the cantilena of Beethoven or Chopin? He must feel it himself!  Talent is feeling, the feeling that every player experiences in his innermost consciousness… It takes years of work to understand and think out […]

“I am a very simple man. I am a man first, an artist second. My first obligation is to the welfare of my fellow man. I will endeavour to meet this obligation through music, since it transcends language, politics and national boundaries.” – Pablo Casals, Spanish cellist. Source: pablocasals.com. Accessed 22 Jan 2013.

Music is a mysterious form of mathematics whose elements are derived from the infinite. Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes. There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in […]

In 1777, Mozart was having lunch with his uncle at the Holy Cross Convent in Ausburg. Mozart played a sinfoni and Vanhall’s Violin Concerto in B. In the evening, at supper, he performed his Strasbourg concerto, a keyboard prelude and his Fischer Variations (K179). It was suggested to the deacon of the Holy Cross Conen, […]

Benjamin Britten wrote the score to Instruments of the Orchestra, which would become the concert work, Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra. The theme to the score was based on a hornpipe from Purcell’s Abdelzer. Britten commented to the producer, Basil Wright, that “I was never really worried that it was too sophisticated for kids […]

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. 

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