“I liked everything about the opera but the music.” – Benjamin Britten on Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress Cited in: Jarski, Rosemarie (2005) Great British Wit.  London: Ebury Press, p. 203.

If Heaven has bestowed on you a fine imagination, you will often be seated at your piano in solitary hours, as if attached to it; you will desire to express the feelings of your heart in harmony, and the more clouded the sphere of harmony may perhaps be to you, the more mysteriously you will […]

Composer: Joe HisaishiArranger: Greg SmithTitle: “Master of the Tomb”, from The Boy and the HeronInstrumentation: Piano Solo This item is available from Sheet Music Direct and Sheet Music Plus.

“Sibelius and his wife Aino were in Gothenburg for a concert, the composer disappeared shortly before he was due to conduct.  Aino found him, immaculately dressed in his white tie and tails, drinking champagne and eating oysters at a nearby cafe.  Returning with him to the venue, she thought her husband was fine until he […]

My love for Schubert is a very serious one, probably because it is no fleeting fancy. Where is genius like his, which soars heavenwards so boldly and surely, where we see the few supreme ones enthroned. He is to me like a son of the gods, playing with Jupiter’s thunder, and also occasionally handling it […]

Title: Abstraction IV Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part SAMPLE:

“Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.” – Paul Johannes Tillich, German American theologian and philosopher

Title: The Stars Looked Tenderly Upon Us (Нам звезды кроткие сияли), op. 60, no.12 Composer: Pytor Il'yrich Tchaikovsky (arr. Greg Smith) Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:

“There is no anxiety in the present. Anxiety is either in the past, worrying about what was just played, or in the future, worrying about what you are about to play. Nothing can be done about either! Don’t judge or evaluate while you’re performing.” — Charles Schlueter, principal trumpet with the Boston Symphony. Cited in: […]

Two flamboyant young musickers leave the town of Lübeck as soon as can be. For they have learned that the successful candidate must marry the daughter of the man in whose shoes they would fain have trodden the pedals. One look at the daughter was enough. She was not fair to see, and her years […]