“Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything is always a portrait of himself and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.” Samuel Butler, The Way of the Flesh  (1903). Forgotten books, p. 60. Cited at Google […]

Title: Lord, you are good and forgiving (Setting II) Text: Psalm 85 (86): 5-6, 9-10, 15-16 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:

Title: Who is the king of glory? Text: Psalm 24 (23): 7-10. R. v.8 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:

Cellist Walter Joachim spend some time in Calcutta, India. He recalled: “I bought a monkey with which to amuse myself. We played. He was sitting on my shoulders for hours when I was practising.” Joachim practised at least one or two movements of a Bach suite. “I started my day usually with Bach or a […]

“Writing and performing an opera, creating any work of art in a world of violence and ease, hunger and obesity, could seem to be an act of private withdrawal. But art isn’t about itself, it’s about how men relate to the world and each other … Asking artists to keep politics out of art is […]

“There is also in this music an extraordinary sense of control over the passage of time; a moment will be held still as if suspended, and then released, with a rush.  Einstein has told us that time is relative, flexible and elastic; I have noticed these qualities whenever I have tried to play to the […]

Sondheim is a lover of games, and collects antique ones (many were destroyed in a fire that swept through the lower floors of the house in 1995). He has a passion for murder mysteries, puzzles (he once spent 18 months devising cryptic crosswords for New York magazine), word play and anagrams. His own name, he […]

Ask him to write a song, though, and he’ll likely turn you down on the basis that he has a problem with “any form of authority, and the authority that is put upon you of writing a song”. “Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle eight…” he says. “It’s always the same bloody structure. I end up […]

"My favorite Russian composer is Borodin, mainly because he had the shortest name. Except for Cui, who was just showing off. […] Cui wrote an opera called A Feast in Time of Plague. Shows you what kind of guy HE was." (Victor Borge, My Favorite Intermissions, New York, 1971, p133)  

Alexander Gow, musician in the band Oh Mercy on spontaneity of artistic creation: [Spontaneity is] when art is expression, and that’s what I’m interested in. If, like you said, there’s a spontaneity to it and it’s an extension of a certain kind of moment or feeling, and if you’re clever enough to express that through […]