Title: Wexford Carol Text: 12th century Irish Composer: 12th century Irish, arr. Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano     Related products:     – Wexford Carol – SATB and piano (PDF score) Product medium: PDF score and parts Sample:

Beethoven was premiering his piano duet, March (op. 45) with duet partner Ferdinand Ries.  When a young count spoke loudly to a lady friend in the room next door, Beethoven jumped up and shouted “I will not play for such swine.” Source: Arganbright, Nancy (2007) “The Piano Duet: A medium for Today”, The American Music […]

Title: Fantasia on “I Saw Three Ships” Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Trombone and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:

Haydn was in London in 1791 when he performed in a concert led by Johann Salomon (a violinist/composer).   Salomon played the first violin and led the orchestra, and Haydn sat at the harpsichord, keeping the band together by an occasional chord or two, as the practice then was. Great composers have not always been […]

“Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which is everything in this world.” — Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. Ramage, Craufurd Tait (1866) Beautiful Thoughts from French and Italian Authors.  Liverpool: Edward Howell, p.232. Digitally archived at https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=nDErAAAAYAAJ&hl=en_AU, accessed 12 September 2021.

I need time to be idle in order to experience and romance my muse, Music, my lifelong partner. In some ways, when I think about the enforced thirty minute practice sessions and much-resented violin lessons during Friday recess which introduced us during my early childhood, our story feels a bit like the plot of a […]

Boyd Neel was the first conductor to record Vaughan William’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis in 1935. He wrote: I often feel that this wonderful work is perhaps the greatest of all achievements in string orchestral composition. Boyd Neel (1986) The Story of an Orchestra. London: Vox Mundi, p.22. Cited in: Holmes, John […]

Widmann, a Swiss poet, describes Brahms’ performing at the piano: The broad leonine chest, the Herculean shoulders, the mighty head which the player sometimes threw back with an energetic jerk, the pensive, handsome brow that seemed to radiate an inner illumination, and the Germanic eyes which scintillated with a wondrous fire between their fair lashes […]

An account by R. L. Stevens (1775): When Handel was blind, and attending a performance of the Oratorio Jephtha, Mr [William] Savage, my master, who sat next to him said, “This movement, sir, reminds of me of some of old Purcell’s music.” “G got te teffel”, said Handel, “if Purcell had lived, he would have […]

“The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet