Easy StreetTitle: Easy Street (Silent film soundtrack) Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: PDF score Related products: – MP3 soundtrack BACKGROUND: FILM: Written by: Charles Chaplin, Vincent Bryan & Maverick Terrell Starring: Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance & Eric Campbell Directed by: Charles Chaplin & Edward Brewer Released: 1917 SAMPLE:
Abstraction XIVTitle: Abstraction XIV Composer: Greg Smith Performer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Product medium: MP3 recording Related products: – Abstraction XIV (PDF score) SAMPLE:
A performance can be greater than themI remember a few years ago being at a summer academy in the south of France, with Dominique Merlet. The whole atmosphere was great there, as we were a group of like-minded people, keen to learn, work and share ideas in the gorgeous setting of a little medieval French village. The concert at the end, […]
The background to BoleroRavel’s infamous Boléro was somewhat created by chance: Shortly before Ravel left for America, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein had asked him for a ballet to be based on orchestrations of parts of Albéniz’s Iberia. To this he agreed; with so much on his plate he was not anxious to undertake further commitments for wholly original composition. […]
Schumann as a studentSchumann studied with Dorn, the conductor at the civic theatre. Dorn recalled: Having completed exercises in figured-bass realization, chorale harmonization, and canon, teacher and student moved on to double counterpoint. Intrigued by the mysteries of this discipline, and reluctant to tear himself away from his desk, Schumann once requested that his lesson take place in […]
Bunking down in the PhilharmonicCellist Gregor Piatigorsky, after running into some problems with his accommodation, was spending a cold November day in the Tiergarten, Berlin, in 1923. Throughout the course of the day, he was approached by Paul Bose to play Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. It began to rain. In Moscow it probably is snowing now, I thought absently, making […]
Conditions stipulated for the Imperial Court ChapelThe Imperial Chapel Choir was founded in Vienna in 1498 and performed exclusively for the court. Composers that worked with the choir included Musicians like Heinrich Isaac, Paul Hofhaimer, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Johann Joseph Fux, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonio Caldara, Antonio Salieri and Anton Bruckner. Schubert was a chorister. After the dissolution of the […]
The musician’s contribution to the world“As musicians, we are already doing something for the world … We make it more flowing? … Through music”. Pianist Lang Lang Shirley Apthorp, “Piano Man”, The Australian, May 14 2011.
Claude Debussy: Suite BergamasqueI. Prélude II. Menuet III. Claire de Lune IV. Passepied The term “bergamasque” refers to the ancient city of Bergame, located forty kilometres east of Milan. The character of its citizens (“rustic and clumsy”) was personified by a series of dances and the Italian comic character Harlequin (1572). This comic character is evident particularly in […]
Positive change through creativityYou need something like Sesame Street to sort of increase the volume of good in the world. And also to know that through creativity, you can make change. Positive change can occur if you’re willing to see a problem and try to fix it and do it creatively. — Trevor Crafts Steve Rose, “The Secret […]
