Beethoven once gave a performance of a new piano concerto in which he forgot he was the soloist and began to conduct instead.  At the first sforzando he threw out his arms so vehemently that he knocked both candlesticks off the piano.  The audience burst out laughing, which enraged Beethoven.  He made the orchestra start […]

“…few of us talk and write about the bigger picture of how our musical and tactical efforts are guided by three distinctly non-musical concepts that don’t get talked and written about often or openly enough: positive vision, abundant thinking, and a sense of self-worth. Thanks to technology, we now live in a world of vast […]

Title: Through the Long Night Composer: Greg SmithText: Edward Carpenter Instrumentation: TTBBProduct medium: PDF score

Benjamin Appl on working with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: When people ask me about what I learned from Fischer-Dieskau, that’s what I always come back to: of course I could say a hundred things about technique and his reputation, but what I found most inspiring was how he created everything afresh. Whenever he was teaching he’d prepare […]

Title: Quasi Dance II Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part SAMPLE:

“What we play is life.” Louis Armstrong, Jazz musician Cited at: Satchmo, “Louis Armstrong Quotes and Tributes.” https://www.satchmo.com/louisarmstrong/quotes.html, accessed 6 September 2021.

In 1995, Bjork released a big band jazz cover of Betty Hutton’s 1948 hit “Blow a Fuse”. This was a cover of an Austrian song “Und jetzt ist es still” by Hans Lang and Erich Meder. Bjork said of the song: Isn’t that the best song you’ve heard for five years? In a way it […]

In the world, in life, and in nature, there is nothing but beautiful tales, and when the door opens, enter and accept it with all your soul. Art is an immense, eternal forest, where the trees stand as sparsely or as densely as you wish. The moon, sun and all kinds of glittering stars move […]

“Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.” Albert Szent-Györgyi , American bio-chemist.

“He accomplishes enormous difficulties, but so quietly, so smoothly and with such constant delicacy and refinement that the listener is not sensible of their real magnitude.  It is the exquisite delicacy, with the liquid mellowness of his tone, and the pearly roundness of his passages of rapid articulation which are the peculiar features of his […]