‘”…turning 40 and new fatherhood have other effects: ‘It opens things up emotionally’, he says.  ‘I find that my whole perspective on life and my whole emotional range generally has changed.  I laugh more easily and cry more easily.  And that probably has an impact on the music making in one way or another.  Everything […]

“If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances.” Jean Sibelius, in conversation with Gustav Mahler, 1907. Cited in: Henry Thomas & Dana Lee Thomas Living Biographies of Great Composers. Garden City (NY): Blue Ribbon, [1940] 1946) p. 309.  [Cited at Wikiquote.]

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.” Simone Weil, French philosopher & mystic. Simone Weil, The Pre-War Notebook (1933-1939), published in First and Last Notebooks (1970) edited by Richard Rees.

From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death—all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes […]

“Morricone brought the electric guitar to the western. The great thing, though, about the electric guitar in the western is that there were no electric guitars, but somehow he did it so committedly that nobody ever questioned it. It was only much later people started to say, ‘How come there’s an electric guitar part there?’ […]

“Pavarotti is like someone who has swalled a Stradivarious.” – Peter Ustinov Cited in: Jarski, Rosemarie (2005) Great British Wit.  London: Ebury Press, p. 203.

John Barry did not get the chance to see any footage and he had not read any of Ian Fleming’s books when he was called in to work on the music for the first James Bond film, Dr No (1962), for which Monty Norman had originally been commissioned to write the score.  “I was just […]

The Hungarian mathematician, Paul von Jankó developed an alternate layout to the traditional piano keyboard. In July 1888, upon seeing a performance in London by John Carlowitz Ames, The Musical Times reported: The clever idea, which suggested itself to the inventor as a means for overcoming the difficulty of stretching long intervals on the pianoforte […]

“During a very busy life I have often been asked, How did you manage to do it all? The answer is very simple. It is because I did everything promptly.  Procastination … is fatal.” Richard Tangye (1833-1903), British manufacter of engines and other heavy equipment. Thomas Sharper Knowlson, The Art of Success, London: F. Warne […]

Title: The Lord is my light (Setting II) Text: Psalm 26 (27): 1, 4, 13-14. R. v.1 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample: