“There is also in this [nineteenth-century romantic] 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 […]

Dearest Stroll! good old troll! you sit in your hole drunk as a Mole! – But you’re touched in your soul by music’s sweet flow. – Mozart, in a letter to Anton Stoll Cited in: Spaethling, Robert (2000) Mozart’s Letters; Mozart’s Life.  London: Faber and Faber, p.438.

In 1908, after a period of intense period of immersion in English music due to his role as editor of Hymns Ancient and Modern, Vaughan Williams “came to the conclusion that I was lumpy and stodgy, had come to a dead-end, and that a little French polish would be of use to me.” (1) He […]

Any artist knows that the space between the stage where the work is too unformed to have committed itself and the stage where it is too late to improve it can be as thin as a needle.  Genius perhaps consists in opening out this needle-like area until it covers almost the whole of the working […]

Composer: Greg Smith Title: I’ll Softly Sigh Instrumentation: Piano Performer: Greg Smith (2010) Your browser does not support the audio element. Sheet music

Young musicians will need resourcefulness to make their way in the world. Music “jobs” in the future are likely to be less attached to institutions (many of which are troubled in one way or another), entrepreneurial, and varied beyond a straight performance career to include all manner of teaching, coaching,  and work we could loosely […]

Title: Minuet I Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Duet Level: Piano I – level I (5 finger position, left and right hands) Product medium: PDF score & MP3 accompaniment track (Audio sample of accompaniment track only)

“Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.” Frank Zappa, composer Cited at QuotationsBook.  

Harpsichordist  Jane Chapman performs both early music and Avante music, including using techniques to use distortion on the harpsichord! “Many early music people are interested in contemporary music, too, and many composers are also interested in early music instruments because they don’t have the baggage of the [classical and romantic periods]. Increasingly, younger generation composers […]

Tin Pan Alley refers to the concentration of music publishers in New York City, West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.  It started around 1885 and lasted till the depression in the 1930s.  It’s title comes from the the sound of all the cheap, tinny pianos playing, being likened to the beating of  tin […]