Category Archives: Music

General Music

James Joyce’s guitar chord

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Continuing my occasional foray into the guitar in literature, here is a famous picture of the author of “Ulysses” and “Finnegan’s Wake” presumably trying out a tune before a session (or maybe about to smash the guitar in frustration). In fact, Joyce was reputed to have had a fine tenor voice, and the singer John McCormack offered to teach him, encouraging him to take music as a career.

The original photo, taken by Ottocaro Weiss ,a friend who was “scandalized” by Joyce’s guitar playing, is housed in Cornell’s James Joyce collection, in an exhibit in a glass closet titled “Poetry and Music.”

Joyce

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Karl Scheit

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A name to conjure with, Karl Scheit was born in 1909 in Schönbrunn (Schlesien), Austria and died in 1993.
He was the guitar editor for Universal Edition, one of the largest and most prestigious publishers of guitar music in the mid 20th century, with publications in English, French, German and Italian. There is now a new and refurbished “Karl Scheit guitar edition”. Most guitarists I know have at some point or other used his editions, which include the Quatre Pièces Brèves by Frank Martin and Richard Rodney Bennet’s Impromptus.
Scheit

 

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Bach visualised

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How often do we suspect that there is more going on in Bach’s music than meets the ear?
Well, a mathematical image-maker Jos Leys has managed to show visually how the first canon from Bach’s Musical Offering looks as it crawls its way first forward, then in reverse, then in both directions at once! Luckily we only have the odd fugue to contend with in the guitar/lute repertoire of Bach and we can play more than two strings simultaneously, unlike viola da gamba players.

Many thanks to Nigel Warburton for passing this on.

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Frankenstein’s guitar, Shelley to van Halen

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With news that scientists have succeeded in growing a mini brain in a Petri dish, Mary Shelley’s “creature” might well be on the way to being created in a lab.
Mary Shelley was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).
For our purposes, she was also married to the man who wrote a rather soppy poem about the guitar to Jane Williams with whom he was infatuated when his marriage was on the rocks.He was particularly taken by her musical gifts and skill as a housewife. Gadzooks! What a piece of male chauvinist lumber!
He was even too cheap to buy her what she really wanted, which was a harp from his friend Horace Smith in Paris, and when this proved too expensive gave her a guitar made in Pisa by Ferdinando Bottari around 1815. ‘I have contrived to get my musical coals at Newcastle itself’, he told Smith.
Shelley's guitar

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Mignone

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Heitor Villa Lobos was such a towering presence in Brazilian music, that other Brazilian composers of the period tend to take a back seat. This, coupled with the fact that Brazil is often excluded in festivals of classical contemporary Latin American music in Europe (because of the language difference) means that we have to go out of our way to find music by contemporaries of Villa Lobos.
Mignone

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West Dean 2013 1

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West Dean – the name conjures up well appointed gardens, a flint covered manor in the middle of the rolling Sussex countryside, sheep, cream teas, Surrealists, the eccentric Edward James and a lively yet dignified community of craftsmen and women, engaged in furniture making, restoration, stained glass, tapestry, blacksmithing, and crafts we only read about in books.
W Dean

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