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Sunday, February 5th, 2006
On Friday I was in Borders bookstore on 2nd Ave. and thought I would take a look at their music section, where I have found several interesting records in the past. And boy did I come up lucky this time! My eye was caught by "Will the Circle Be Unbroken", by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band -- I've been working on learning that song lately, and I've always heard good things about that band, so I bought it. Turns out to be one of the greatest things ever. In 1972 the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band hooked up with a lot of older, more established country musicians including Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson and Jimmy Martin. They recorded an album together that just soars -- it has all of the songs I want to hear together, absolutely ideal performances. Well I was listening to that all weekend, and especially liking the songs that featured Mother Maybelle -- "Sunny Side" and "Wildwood Flower" come to mind -- and that made me think I ought to listen to the Carter Family some. I was listening to a record of theirs this afternoon, and thinking this could be the music that I wrap my own musical ideas around -- the sound of it really gets to me, and I think I could play and sing a lot of it in a good and interesting way. "John Hardy Was a Desperate Man" is maybe the first thing I want to learn.
posted evening of February 5th, 2006: Respond
➳ More posts about Fiddling
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Thursday, February second, 2006
Fantastic -- I just got a referral from Google.hu (which I am thinking is Hungary), for the query "get on board" ride the blind conductor prodigal son blues.
posted morning of February second, 2006: Respond
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Last night I had a second fiddle lesson, this one was with Lisa Gutkin. Good time -- Lisa is very free and easy with the positive reinforcement which I sse as a critical element of lessons that I am taking. We worked on "May the Circle be Unbroken" primarily, and she showed me how I can work on my hand and wrist position holding the bow in order to sweeten my tone. I will be back for more.
posted morning of February second, 2006: Respond
➳ More posts about Music
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Monday, January 30th, 2006
ABC Notation is described over here, it's an ASCII system of musical notation. Shareware products are available for translating ABC to standard musical notation and to audio files; of these I have tried abc2ps, abc2win, and ABCEdit. I couldn't get the first two to work properly but ABCEdit is awesome. Very basic user interface but powerful enough to do everything I want it to; I can cut-and-paste from ABC notation on the web and see and hear the music right away.
posted morning of January 30th, 2006: Respond
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Saturday, January 28th, 2006
Pressing ahead with the music-reading -- today I played a couple of the jigs I had been playing yesterday, and learned two new reels -- "Judy's Reel" and "Paddy Handley's Goose". The latter is the first song I have been able to play from memory after reading from sheet music.
posted morning of January 28th, 2006: Respond
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Friday, January 27th, 2006
Tonight we watched Duck Soup again, this time on DVD which I recommend strongly -- I have never seen such a good print of a Marx Brothers film before. Sylvia was way into it and wrote her grandparents a long e-mail about the mirror scene.
posted evening of January 27th, 2006: Respond
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More music reading tonight -- I learned the A part of "A Wink of Her Eye" and all of "The Cork Road". Both songs are very slightly more complex than "Bundle and Go" (Which I played for Ellen and Sylvia to dance to before dinner). Learning jigs is bringing back a bunch of musical memories -- "A Wink of Her Eye" brought to mind a similar tune (which I don't know the name of), which I was able to play straight off note for note. Also I found the Fiddler's Companion, which has many traditional tunes written out in ABC notation, which I can download shareware to convert to musical notation and to audio files.
posted evening of January 27th, 2006: Respond
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Last night I read music! I bought a book of tunes from Amazon, and when I sat down and looked at it, I surprised myself greatly by being able to translate the notes on the page into sounds. The tune was a simple jig called "Bundle and Go" -- it helped greatly that almost every note in the song had the same time value, and that most of the intervals were thirds.
posted afternoon of January 27th, 2006: Respond
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Wednesday, January 18th, 2006
I have been playing my fiddle increasingly often over the past year, hardly playing guitar at all any more. Today I am going to take my first ever lesson in traditional fiddle playing from Kenny Kosek. Looking forward to it.
posted afternoon of January 18th, 2006: Respond
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Monday, January 16th, 2006
Going to the zoo in January has two downsides: it is very cold, and many of the animals, the ones which are used to warm climates, are not out where you can see them. Upsides: there are few people there, so you've got the place pretty much to yourself; the animals which are used to cold climates include some that are fun to watch; and there are indoor displays like the reptile house, where you can warm up between walking around outside. We took Sylvia and her friend Sasha to the Bronx Zoo this afternoon and had a great time. For me, primates are the name of the game at zoos, the animals I can spend the longest interested time just watching. And the Bronx Zoo has some great primates. We had been walking around for about half an hour and seen some nice stuff -- bison, tigers, snow leopards, red pandas, the many nocturnal species in the House of Darkness... when we got to the Congo Rainforest exhibit. No animals were out in the outdoor part of the exhibit of course; but the indoor part is one of the best zoo displays I have ever seen. First we saw the guenons, small orange monkeys -- one of them spent about half a minute sticking his tongue out at me and Sasha -- then moved on to the living room of the gorillas. The largest female gorilla was sleeping right next to the glass partition, holding her newborn son in her arms. (I think I got a good photo of the two of them.) Behind her, another female was sleeping; after a minute or two a male came over and tapped her on the shoulder. She started up and glared at him but he made nice and cuddled behind her, laid his head on her shoulder, closed his eyes and grinned. She lay there for a minute or two, eyes open, with an irritated expression, then jumped up, picked up the pillow of straw she had been resting on, carried it over a little ways and went back to sleep. The rejected male followed after a minute or two and sat right next to her, carefully not touching her. Sylvia and Sasha sat next to the glass for easily fifteen minutes, narrating everything the apes were doing. More simian fun at the Monkey House, where the largest enclosure is home to about 15 capuchins. Sylvia and Sasha spent another ten minutes or so watching these extremely high-energy monkeys jumping around and playing with each other. Their favorite playthings seem to be empty containers.
posted evening of January 16th, 2006: Respond
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