Luthier

I'd never heard of the word, luthier, until I went looking for something about Greg Bennett and acoustic guitars. Apparently Greg Bennett is a luthier, which means he designs and makes stringed instruments - in his case, generally guitars. 

The word luthier is obviously related to the word lute, and lutanist and so on, but it has a kind of lisp sound about it, as though someone was trying to say the name Lucia. 

Okay, that was totally irrelevant, and I shouldn't make fun of anyone who has a lisp. However, the word lisp has a long history, going back before the year 1100 at least, and connects the Middle English words, whlispen or lispen, to the Old English word āwlyspian, and is like the Dutch word, lisp and the German word lispeln. There you go, didn't know you were going to get a lesson on the origin of words. 

You can find out more about Greg Bennett guitars here: 

http://www.guitarcenter.com/Greg-Bennett-Design-Samick/Acoustic-Guitars.gc

I assume the man in the picture is Greg Bennett, and not just some model smiling and holding a Greg Bennett guitar...

Culinary musical items

Looking for unusual gifts for the musicians in your life? Try this link:
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/unique-unusual-gifts. 

Among other things you can have a 20-watt hand-wired head. Now, that's unusual. I'm quite glad I don't have a hand-wired head. The one I've got is confusing enough at the best of times. 

Another option is Minotaur stands. No wait, that's monitor stands. Always did have trouble spelling certain words. Similar, for instance. I always used to spell it as similiar, like familiar. Seemed logical at the time. 

You can get livid guitar wings. I don't think these are akin to chicken wings, but they sound pretty tasty, kind of spicy, as though someone had put jalapeños in them. Describing them as livid does give the taste buds something to think about - or hope to avoid.

The livid guitar wings may have a connection with the pink taco closed-back guitar speakers. What is it about these musical devices? Are they all designed by Mexican chefs?

The mind kind of boggles (not hard, if it's been hand-wired.)

Incidentally, the pink tacos will set you back about $2000NZ. Kind of expensive for a Christmas present. But hey, if you can't buy expensive for friends, who can you buy expensive for? 

Quite Interesting

Now here's a line to conjure with. It's like some sort of code: Seagull Entourage CW GT QI Acoustic-electric guitar at Guitar Center.

Let's take it one step at a time: Seagull. Well, we know what that is: a bird of various sizes and shapes that tend to congregate near the sea. Some congregate near humans if the latter are eating. They congregate until it's the seagulls that are eating and not the humans.

Entourage: a congregation of seagulls following the leader. And congregating.

CW: This could stand for anything, but here are some possibilities. A TV Network producing such hits as Arrow, Beauty and the Beast, etc. An abbreviation for Morse Telegraphy. (Yup, I wondered why too.) There are about forty others listed, including some that seem to make no more sense that the Morse one. Cook Islands?

GT: My favourite meaning for this acronym is GigaTexel which apparently means one billion filtered textured pixels. You really wanted to know that, didn't you.

QI - Only about twenty listed for QI. Plainly not such a popular combination of letters.  However, it's quite interesting that QI is an acronym for Quite Interesting. I think.

So, some marketing person put all these things together and connected them to an acoustic guitar. The world is full of puzzles. Including why someone would write a blog post about it. There is a reason for that.

Maybe multitasking

Sometimes the things you write about have a kind of surreal lack of sense, such as the following item:
good zoom h4n at Guitar Center.

The individual words seem clear enough, but combined together they're strange. And unfortunately clicking on the link doesn't seem to help much either. Maybe I've been doing too much gardening today, in the heat, and my brain has lost its capacity to think clearly.  Or maybe it's because I've spent the week working on my next book, which is about prostate issues and their complications, and I've lost my ability to focus on anything else.

Or maybe it's because my wife is speaking Italian at me and I'm trying to think in two languages at once.  Or, as she's now doing, reading some ridiculous maths problem on Facebook out to me. How many things does she think I can cope with at once? Plainly she reckons I'm much more capable of multitasking than I thought.  Except that I had to ask her to remind me of the word multitasking anyway.

Don't stop too soon

While looking through my Evernote clippings for references to guitars (and there were a distractingly large number of them) I came across this quote by recording artist, John Mayer (who may or may not use a good Telefunken M80 - I only discovered that a Telefunken M80 is a mic a few minutes ago).

“I can’t stress enough how important it is to write bad songs. There’s a lot of people who don’t want to finish songs because they don’t think they’re any good. Well they’re not good enough. Write it! I want you to write me the worst songs you could possible write me because you won’t write bad songs. You’re thinking they’re bad so you don’t have to finish it. That’s what I really think it is. Well it’s all right. Well, how do you know? It’s not done!”

The paragraph's a bit cluttered - it may have been taken down verbatim, of course - but it has a kind of truth in it. You can't write good songs unless you've written bad songs, and even bad songs have to be finished in order to prove for all time that they're too bad to be bothered further with. Over the Christmas/New Year period I wrote three or four, or maybe five songs. At least two of them breezed off the page without looking back and proved their worth from day one. The other three...? Well, they've got potential but they're not quite sorted yet. I could abandon them but that might mean that good material gets dumped because it isn't quite right yet.

Equally, when you write a scene for a play or a novel and say, 'That's so bad I can't even go further with it,' you may not have got to the nut of the thing.  Yup, you may be right about its badness, but more to the point, you'll do two things: you'll have decided on the badness of the scene before you've finished it, which may mean you won't discover something good that's still to come, and, you'll begin to tell yourself I'm not very good, so why should I bother? Once again the internal critic will have got you by the short and curlies and another possible writer may bite the dust.

I can remember trying to write a scene for the musical Grimhilda! We had a rough idea of what the scene had to do within the overall structure of the story, but the characters that were needed just weren't there. I sat and thought about it, and thought about it, and thought about it, and never quite got to starting to write it. (I can procrastinate like nobody's business.) Finally I took my co-writer's advice and just wrote, anything, something, just to get started. The scene took off, characters turned up, and we were away. I haven't gone back to look, but I doubt if that first draft is anything like what was eventually performed on stage. I know however that in the midst of the 'stuff' that the scene eventually came out of there will be some things that stayed, that were the true elements of that particular scene.

I've got a book amongst the innumerable books on writing that I possess by a guy called Peter Elbow. It's entitled, Writing without Teachers.  I don't think I've ever read more than the first chapter, but I keep the book because in that first chapter (or at least very early in the book) he makes the valuable point. When you don't know what to write, just start writing - anything, the most utter drivel on the face of the earth, stuff that you wouldn't let your mother see, stuff you wouldn't give the dog to eat. (This is my paraphrase; it's not what Mr Elbow actually says.)  And this is all you can do. Writing requires you to write. Of course there's thinking to be done, but sometimes that comes after you've started writing. I remember starting a story - I think there were about thirty pages - and realising that two or three vivid characters had turned up out of nowhere, and were determined to stay. Eventually, of course, they were changed and the story was changed and little of that original thirty pages survived, but the fire had been lit and was burning in that stretch of just writing.

Anne Lamott calls this kind of writing shitty first drafts. Yup, that's what they are, but out of the manure grows something that's beautiful and edible. Don't stop too soon.

Apostrophizing

Ibanez RG8 review at Musicians Friend. Excuse the lack of an apostrophe in that previous sentence, but I'm just copying what someone else has given me, and the someone else obviously doesn't know about apostrophes...or doesn't care. They're obviously of the grammatical school that goes along with this line:

Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit when its not needed.

Talking of apostrophes, did you know that there's an ebook-selling company called, 'txtr?  The apostrophe is part of their title, weird and all as it seems. Apparently they're a German company originally, but there's even a branch that sells books with NZ prices applied to them. I'd never heard of them until just now...and I've no idea why they'd use the apostrophe in such an odd way.

I made a fuss in the first paragraph about the lack of an apostrophe, but it seems there's an ongoing push  to get rid of the thing entirely, partly on the basis that in speech we don't make any indication that we're using apostrophes at all. (Perhaps we should 'click' our tongues?) I remember writing a column about this years ago: it certainly makes reading more difficult, however, because certain words, such as cant have a different pronunciation when the apostrophe is removed - on the page - though context will usually tell you what word is intended. And the idea that the apostrophe is a waste of time isn't new.  Way back in 1902 George Bernard Shaw (who always considered himself a forward thinker in terms of spelling) wrote: "There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli." As forthright as Shaw's statement is, I'm not sure that apostrophes can really be classified as bacteria, and who would regard the use of apostrophes as a 'trick?'  There's an interesting article in Slate magazine giving some background to the ongoing debate about, and the history of, apostrophes. Seems they're not as longstanding a fixture of the English language as we thought.

Apostrophe, as a word, has often been used in a different sense entirely, one that we now consider archaic.  Here's Charles Spurgeon writing, and using its different meaning: "Thrusting, thou hast thrust at me." It is a vigorous apostrophe, in which the enemy is described as concentrating all his thrusting power into the thrusts which he gave to the man of God. According to one online dictionary, Spurgeon is using the word in this sense: The direct address of an absent or imaginary person or of a personified abstraction, especially as a digression in the course of a speech or composition. I've come across this usage regularly in Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, but here's another example of just such a usage, which was common in the 19th century: On finishing school at 16,in spite of a threat of disinheritance from her grandfather, a state senator, Antoinette joined her uncle's stock company, billed as "The youngest female star in America." When the company played New York in 1906, she [was]called "the sweetest, most piquant ingenue Broadway has seen for many long months." Her stage personality was "distinct," her acting "clever and winsome," and her beauty "such as the poets apostrophize."

Anyway, to get back to the contemporary meaning of apostrophe, here's an example of its complete misuse from the NZ Herald. This advertisement was the subject of much rubbishing on Twitter back on the 18th of August this year. 

Keen-eyed readers will note four incorrect uses of the apostrophe. There's also a word missing in the first sentence, a stylistic misuse of the number five, and, according to Vaughn Davis, @vaughndavis, one questionable sentence. I'm not sure which one he's referring to, however. 

Oh, for the days of proofreaders!  [Yeah, go on, I bet you can find a misuse of something in this post too!]

Missing Simon

I like this anecdote I came across somewhere on the Web: Simon and Garfunkel recorded their first folk album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, in 1964, but it only sold a few thousand copies. They figured their career was probably over, but, unbeknownst to Simon and Garfunkel, their record label had added electric guitars to the song "The Sounds of Silence" and released it as a single. They had just moved back in with their parents and were sitting in Simon's car, wondering what to do next, when they heard the song come on the radio, and the DJ said it had gone to No. 1. Simon turned to Garfunkel and said, "That Simon and Garfunkel, they must be having a great time."

How exciting, as exciting as exciting discount guitars would be to someone who's been saving up their pennies to buy a top quality guitar and then finds that it's been reduced in price...now he can afford to buy some music as well!

Paul Simon visited Dunedin recently, and performed at the new (nearly new) Stadium, which is the pride and joy of some of the citizenry.  I didn't go. Couldn't afford to go.  Haven't been able to afford to go to any of the concerts the Stadium has hosted, except the free one which the Otago Daily Times put on to celebrate it's 150th Anniversary.  Ah well.  At least Paul Simon and I were in the same town briefly.

Capo and pronunciation

The word, capo, if you're an Italian, is pronounced (roughly) - car-po (though without any sound of the letter 'r').  It means the head, and of course we get our word, cap, from it.  Which is pronounced like tap.  But when a musician takes hold of an excellent capo, (or even one that's not so hot), a capo that he's brought from a reputable shop (or even one that's not), he pronounces the word, Kay-po, as in the person's name. Well, he does in New Zealand anyway.  Or she does, if she's a female from the same country.

I doubt that most Italians would recognise the word, and it's curious that it gets such different pronunciations.  In case you're reading this and you don't know what a capo is, it's a device like a highly intricate clothes peg that gets hooked over the strings of a guitar or other similar instrument in order to save the player having to figure out how to play something in a different key.  Instead, the capo does the job for him, and the player just plays as if he was playing in the original key.  You're still with me, aren't you?  It's explained better here.

Talking of pronunciation, my wife and I have been continuing to learn Arabic.  We've just struck the section on verbs - not the easy verbs we were using when we started the course, which we've got familiar with - but present, past and future tense verbs.  These are like thickets of sounds that have various things stuck on the front or the back, and then more things stuck on in front of the ones stuck on the front already, and then other ones replacing the ones we stuck on the front last time.  And each time we stick one on, it changes the general sound of the original word.  Oh, how I love English.  In some areas, it is so easy.

I'm sure Arabic is easy - in some areas.  We've found some of them.  At the moment we're not finding them....

La cathédrale engloutie

La cathédrale engloutie is a piano piece by Claude Debussy, one of the twelve Preludes he published in 1910.  I've played it since I was a teenager, and always enjoyed the way the deep bass notes resonate underneath notes in the higher registers, as well as the way the huge chords build up in the climax.  I remember it being performed in Dunedin's Concert Chamber (as it was known then) by a touring New Zealand female pianist - her name escapes me, but she was well known.  In the middle of the piece (almost literally in the middle) she had a momentary mental block, and stopped. Fortunately she was able to carry on quickly and only those who knew the piece would have noticed.  But she must have been disappointed; the momentary break caused a much bigger emotive break. 

So, La cathédrale engloutie is a piano piece, and it was written for the piano, and sounds very good on the piano.  I have no objections to musicians and composers transcribing well-known piano pieces for other instruments, or for orchestras, but sometimes only the original instrument conveys the composer's intentions satisfactorily.  (Occasionally it works the other way: Ravel's orchestration of Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is probably superior in almost every way to the original piano version.  The piano version is marvellous, and exhilarating to play, but a full orchestra has the capacity to give depth and breadth and variety to the music in a way few pianists can.)  

However, just this week I've heard two other instruments playing La cathédrale engloutie, one a guitar, and the other - just this morning - a harp.  Nope, this piece doesn't work on either of those instruments: the sonority of the piano is totally missing, the ability to sustain notes with the pedal while others are being played is totally missing, the wondrous booming bass pedal note that thunders through the piece again and again cannot be achieved on either a guitar or a harp.  I could barely hear this bass note in the harp version - there was a kind of clonk somewhere in the depths every so often - and while the guitar achieved the effect a little better, I would guess it was at the expense of shifting the registers of the original music around.  

I suppose it must be disappointing if you're a harpist or a guitarist not to be able to play all music written for the piano.  It sounds like an easy process of transcription really - all three instruments have a fair number of notes at their disposal; all three can play chords comfortably.  But sometimes you harpist or you guitarist just have to admit there are certain pieces that will sound worse if tackled on your instrument.  Please refrain from playing those.

I wrote some piano pieces early last year - after I'd finished writing the music for Grimhilda!.  Not one of these four pieces would sound effective on a guitar or a harp. They rely on the particular percussiveness of the piano, the ability to wash the notes together with the sustaining pedal, and the wide tonal range that the piano has.  I'm going to keep them hidden from any guitarists or harpists I meet...

Not a disaster, thank goodness

Well, it's been a bit of a day.  First we helped at the monthly church lunch this morning - and over lunchtime, of course.  It was a barbecue day, so I was cooking onions, as I have done traditionally since we started these lunches.  Beautiful day (following an equally beautiful day yesterday) and I probably got my neck sunburnt.  I mention the beautiful days because we've had a long run of rainy days, or days with bitter, sharp winds, or a combination of both.  Seeing the sun for more than a few minutes at a time is a great relief.  

Because it was so lovely yesterday, my wife and I went for a walk along the road that runs beside the reservoir up on Dalziel Rd.  We'd never been down there before, and eventually it peters out and becomes the lead-in to some private properties, but we got a fair walk out of it, with a moderate amount of hill-climbing.  There's a deer farm along there, so we and the deer inspected each other (and the dog did too) both going and coming back, and they performed intricate manoeuvres whenever we tried to count how many there were.  (Forty-ish, we decided.)  On one of the properties (which appear to be mostly lifestyle blocks of several acres) there was a host of gum trees, a wonderful cathedral sight, with rich, dense grass beneath.

As we drove back home again, via a road that used to be gravel and is now sealed (and was unpleasant to drive on when it was only gravel, because it's fairly steep in places) we saw some small bird that appeared to have things dangling from it on either side.  At first I thought they were wings, but they remained stationery when the bird flew.  Some curious decoration, and not a bird I recognise at all.

In the afternoon we shovelled some more bark mulch onto our garden, and I went for an audition for the play on the life of Rosalie Macgeorge that our church is putting on at Easter next year - it's the church's 150th anniversary.   And that was pretty much enough to wear us out for the day...

But back to today.  After we'd finished with the lunch at church, we decided to head straight down to Port Chalmers, where Sunny Side Up (the a cappella group I sing with) was doing six songs at Iona Church, as part of that church's fundraising.  (A million dollars are required just to bring the church back to its normal state.)

We thought we'd kill the extra time we had before the concert started by having a cup of coffee in Port Chalmers.  We nearly didn't get there.  On the way down, my wife was eating the salad she'd brought with her.  She started to cough, then choke and splutter, and then just choke full stop.  I stopped the car - it took a moment for me to realise that she was trying to get her breath - but I had no idea how to help her.  Apparently a stringy bit of salad had gone the wrong way down and was caught at the back of her throat.  She tried to reach into her mouth to get it, but her fingers couldn't grasp it because it was too slippery.  I tried, with no result either.  She grabbed a kitchen cloth that we had in the car for no obvious reason and, because it was dry and had some grip, managed to grasp the bit of lettuce and pull it out.  Messy and extremely scary.  For both of us.

Onto Port Chalmers feeling rather edgy after that experience, and had a coffee in a cafe near the Church.   The concert had an interesting mix of artists, with Owen Rooney as compère.  Apart from SSU, there was a pianist, an Irish comedian/baritone (the pianist accompanied him too), two very good saxophonists (one of whom I'd seen playing at the Competitions a few weeks ago), a quartet of singers made up of some of the top people from SSU (known as One Lucky Guy because there are three women and one man in it); a woman singing her own compositions accompanying herself on guitar, and an organist (I think the church's organist, in fact).  One Lucky Guy are a great combination, and do some marvellous, jazzy, a cappella arrangements.  The composer's songs had interesting guitar accompaniments, but didn't seem to have an awful lot of lyrical content, though the singer had a good voice.  The Irish baritone, who had a lovely voice that was still holding up even though he obviously wasn't young, told some good clean jokes, and sang some old favourites from the Irish ballad repertoire (not Danny Boy, thank goodness).  The pianist's solos left a little to be desired; I got the impression he'd played them a lot (he plays at rest homes and such) and that his heart wasn't quite in it.  I might have been wrong.  The organist....well, I'm not sure what was happening up there in the organ loft, but it was a bit dodgy at times!

And home...

Listening - or not - to Cage

After hearing quite a decent piece of music by John Cage yesterday when we were driving to the supermarket, something that had lots of fun arpeggios on the piano and people clapping rhythmically at other times, I thought I'd give Cage another go and listen to today's episode in the series the Concert programme is running. 

So far I'm remaining almost complete underwhelmed. It was interesting to hear in the introductory talk about this series that Schoenberg thought Cage had little sense of harmonic structure.  Certainly in the piece playing now (Concerto for prepared piano & chamber orchestra) he just seems to add note after note without any obvious musical connection: though of course he was into music constructed by maths/graphs and whatever, so perhaps that explains why it sounds like it does...

And you can hear the music of his followers echoed in every bar: the long held notes crescendoing and descrecendoing but going nowhere in particular; the burps and sudden interruptions from the brass, always in dissonance; the percussion sounding as though they've lost one of their mallets and are banging their way around amongst the instruments trying to find it; the sudden squeaks from the high instruments as though someone had pinched their bottoms; the modified ('prepared') piano making various interesting but unconnected noises. (I bet some pianos aren't prepared for the indignities that are 'performed' upon them!) The only thing missing are plucked notes from an Ovation guitar - perhaps it hadn't been invented when Cage was writing. 

The current piece has been going on in this vein for several minutes.  It must be very unsatisfying to play.   I can't quite figure out where the concerto element comes into it: the piano doesn't seem to be doing anything more or less than the other instruments.  They're all being as random as each other.  According to the link above, the piano and orchestra never play together in parts one and two of the three parts, and the thing as a whole was originally worked out from a 14 x 16 chart.  You need to read the explanation - and hopefully you can make more sense of the phrase towards the end: 'thus the prepared piano is released from its hunger for self-expression.'   Apparently self-expression was banned from Cage's later works. 

The Concert programme is just about to start playing Hector Berlioz' Requiem.  This is a wonderful piece of music, and I've seen/heard it performed live twice, once in the Dunedin Town Hall way back in the sixties, and once in St Paul's Cathedral in London - only a few years later.  The walls of St Paul's were reverberating with the vibrations coming from the multiple timpani.  

I wonder what Berlioz would think of Cage's mechanically-made music? 

The Poetry competition I missed out on

 I noticed a competition in the North and South magazine I brought home from my old workplace yesterday.  It required you to write a poem in which every lined rhymed with all the others - the poem still had to make reasonable sense.  However, it was the June 2011 edition of the magazine, so I guess someone has already won this particular competition.   Not that it stopped me being 'inspired' by the idea.

I'm not a man who frequents bars;
Or thinks it cool to down large jars
Of beer; I've never ever tried cigars;
I don't get sweaty seeing big, fast cars,
And consequently have no scars
From crashing and then seeing stars. 
What, you ask, do I live on Mars?
Not at all, I've watched the movie, Lars
And the Real Girl, grammar I can parse,
I know the name of the Curé of Ars,
(John Vianney), know that Fars
Is a province in Iran, formerly called Pars,
Can differentiate Picassos and Renoirs,
However, I've never finger-picked guitars
In bazaars frequented by Russian Czars. 

Guitar players

Luke Hurley, well known in music circles around the country, and one of my former customers (from the time I ran O C Books) wrote on Facebook that one of his songs, Sound, features in the opening of The Insatiable Moon - which premieres in the middle of next month. 

He (no mean guitarist himself, as his Sound video shows) also put some videos on Facebook: this one appealed in particular. Just goes to show that it's possible to play an instrument in more than one way - and it's probably easier on the wrist as well, as you don't have to twist it while playing.

****************

5.7.24 That was the original short post, but the video that accompanied it originally has been removed from YouTube. You can now see a better video of The Sound (not just 'Sound'). The direction is by Simon Raby. The girl who appears is Zippora Rose Seven, who now a top model in New York.