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Music
I've had a pretty complex relationship with music over the years... ought to write about that sometime. Anyways: I listen to a lot of it, in genres like "rock" and "pop" and "folk", and play some of it, primarily in the genres "old-time" and "classical".
So I've been writing these short fiddle tunes over the past couple of months with "Sally" in the title. (You can listen to some of them here.) The new one tonight is called "Sally's Reel", though I'm not totally sure what conditions a song has to meet for a reel to be danced to it; I just sounds kind of reelish. ABC Format or PDF.
Update: renamed to "Sally's Dance" -- Gabe let me know that reels generally have a more even rhythm than this tune. And suggested chords for it!
posted evening of February 16th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about Fiddling
Wow, this is excellent! While going through stuff to pack for our vacation, I just found a CD I had thought lost forever, viz. disk 1 of "The Carter Family" -- this box set about which I think, disk 1 is really amazing music, disks 2 through 5 vary in quality but have an unfortunate tendency towards corny.
In the interview yesterday (which features good humor and some real insight) Robyn recommends Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go as "a gently devastating book." I had not heard of the book before but now I'm thinking it looks really interesting. -- Here is an interview with Ishiguro and some readings from the book. Onto the queue it goes!
We're off to see them this evening, at the Yippie! Museum. Cool!
A little vacation coming up; on Monday we're flying away to St. Thomas for a week. I'm going to try and stay away from computers while we're there, unless a work emergency intrudes; so not blogging. Also I think I will take a vacation from my music: not bring along an instrument or an iPod, and only listen to new sounds. Send me your address (by Sunday) and I will send you a postcard.
Hmm, no SLM for us this evening. We did not feel up to the journey into the city -- instead we had a very nice dinner at home and watched Time Bandits, which Ellen has never seen before. What a great film -- I think it is the best ... fantasy? movie -- I hesitate to call Time Bandits "fantasy" but I guess all the lesser movies I associate it with are in that genre.
posted evening of February 15th, 2008: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
Further to the point below about my cheap viola being as satisfying to play as the more expensive ones I have tried out -- It seems to be easier to get volume out of it than out of the expensive ones. I reckon the trade-off is that the sound is a little coarser, though my ear is not well-enough trained to distinguish that yet. For the music I play, which is by and large not classical, this is totally acceptable. (Also it could be that if I went one step more expensive, tried playing the $1000 instruments, I would find them to have all the volume of my fiddle plus the smoother sound that I'm postulating the $500 instruments have. This is just guesswork though.)
This afternoon we all three went over to Menzel Violins to hear Kathy Chiavola play music from her recent and forthcoming records. What a voice she has! I bought her record The Harvest, looking forward to listening to that; also looking forward to her next record which will include her "Ghost of the Wild Mississippi", one of the loveliest evironmentalist songs I can think of.
On her second set, she asked for musicians to back her up. I volunteered (with some urging from Sylvia) and ended up playing one of Mo's violas (a $500 instrument which served to reinforce my happiness with my cheap model -- not that it was difficult to play or anything but the sound was not noticeably better) with Carl Croce (a distant relative of Jim) on guitar and Dan O'Dea on fiddle. We played on the last three songs -- I was sorry to miss much of the set, backstage. I'm definitely going to start taking lessons with Dan, I got a good sense of what he would be like as a teacher.
Another fun fiddle experience this weekend: yesterday we went to a Chinese New Year celebration, where a man was playing èrhú. There were a couple of violinists hovering round asking him to explain the instrument, and he invited us to give it a try. I did and was able to produce a pretty convincing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star".
Going to an open jam tonight at Mo Fiddles -- the second one this year, the first I am going to. Really nice -- my last regular jam was the one Citizen Kafka organized in Chinatown, many years back now and before I had even picked up my violin. I'm so happy there is one going on around here.
Such a great evening. Met lots of people I could hit it off with, including Dan of Dan's Bands who knows of a bunch of other bluegrass and old-time jams in the area. So much fun.
A bit of (decidedly NSFW) bluegrass gospel from
John R. Butler:
(Thanks to Gabe for the link.) And whaddaya know -- Bad Gods is updated today (well sometime in the couple of weeks since I last checked anyway), with a most appropriate image:
Microgravity experiments: here's video from the International Space Station. I especially like the Symphony of Spheres but they're all good. In space, you can drink your tea with chopsticks!
