The composer Burton Lane describes George Gershwin’s playing: You could feel the electricity going through the room when he played.  He could transpose into any key with the greatest of ease.  He had total command of what he was doing.  Musical surprises, unusual changes of keys.  He was one of the few composers who had […]

“It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet

An undiscovered piano piece by Brahms (entitled Albumblatt, meaning “sheet music from an album”) has been discovered by Christopher Hogwood at Princeton University. The tune reappears in second movement of Brahms’ Horn Trio, written 12 years later. Alex Needham, “Brahms piano piece to get its premiere 159 years after its creation”, The Guardian, 13 January […]

“Success is not the place one arrives but rather the spirit with which one undertakes and continues the journey.” Alex Noble Cited at: Quotations Book

TITLE: Lord, every nation on earth will adore you (setting ii) TEXT: Psalm 71 (72): 1-2, 7-8, 10-13. R. cf. v.11 COMPOSER: Greg Smith INSTRUMENTATION: SATB and piano PRODUCT MEDIUM: PDF score and part

Title: Air III Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano Duet Level: Piano I – level 1 (five finger positions, left and right hands) Product medium: PDF score & MP3 accompaniment track (Audio sample of accompaniment track only)

Tchaikovsky was an enthusiastic student at the St. Petersberg Conservatoire.  Anton Rubinstein asked Tchaikvosky to write a series of contrapuntal variations on a given theme.  "I expected that he would present me with about a dozen.  But Tchaikovsky turned up the next class day with more than two hundred!" Cited in: Hanson, Lawrence and Elisabeth […]

“Hope is the dream of a soul awake.”— French proverb. R. A. Krieger, Civilization’s Quotations: Life’s Ideal, New York, Algora Publishing, 2002, p.151. 

1 1 1   For Pythagoras (c. 570 BCE – c. 495 BCE), the ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician, numbers were not merely a mathematical phenomena, but were representative all levels of existence, from the individual, to society, to the universe as a whole. In Metaphysica (Metaphysics), Aristotle wrote: Pythagoreans applied themselves to mathematics, and […]

“His creation was spontaneous and miraculous. He found it without seeking it, without forseeing it. It came on his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk when he was impatient to play it to himself. But then he began the most heart-rending labor I ever saw. It was a […]