In a letter to his friend Abbé Joseph Bullinger, Mozart jokes about the musical environment in Salsburg. One of his subjects is the search for an additional final principle singer. “I can hardly believe it!” he wrote “A female singer!? When we have so many already! – and all of them first rate…” (1). Mozart […]

Ravel’s infamous Boléro was somewhat created by chance: Shortly before Ravel left for America, the Russian dancer Ida Rubinstein had asked him for a ballet to be based on orchestrations of parts of Albéniz’s Iberia. To this he agreed; with so much on his plate he was not anxious to undertake further commitments for wholly original composition. […]

“Writing music is seventy-five per cent an intellectual activity.  This effort is often more pleasant for me than having a rest.” Conversation with Ravel, recalled by Robert de Fragny, Echo liberté, 7 November 1950. Cited in: Nichols, Roger (1987) Ravel Remembered.  London: Faber & Faber., p. 61.

The famous organist Reincken heard Bach play. Bach improvised for half an hour on the hymn “By the Waters of Babylon”.  Reincken said: “I thought such art was dead, but I see it still lives in you.” Siblin, Eric (2009) The Cello Suites.  Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, p. 58.

Title: In Memory of  Those in Paradise   Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score SAMPLE:

Title: Cry out with joy and gladness Text: Isaiah 12:2-6 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano (unison verses) Product medium: PDF score and part SAMPLE:    

“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.” Matthew Arnold (poet and scholar), Preface to Literature and Dogma (1873 edition), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Literature_and_Dogma/Introduction, accesssed 29 August 2021.

Beethoven, who is often bizarre and baroque, takes at times the majestic flight of an eagle, and then creeps in rocky pathways. He first fills the soul with sweet melancholy, and then shatters it by a mass of shattered chords. He seems to harbor together doves and crocodiles. A review of Beethoven’s First Symphony, Tablettes […]

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Pianist Artur Schnabel was asked at a public forum why his repertoire was so restricted: My answer is that now I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed.  Therefore I feel (rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a […]