Posts Tagged music
A song for Faith
I asked Pandora.com for Tori Amos, and they offered me Fiona Apple. Can you believe I’ve never heard a song by Fiona Apple? “Criminal” is making me think of Faith the Slayer.
Why oh why?
Why do I not listen to Pandora.com more often? This morning’s shipment flew by as they played Django Reinhardt and Ruth Etting for me. Somehow I know the melodies to those songs even when I don’t know the lyrics (yet).
Friday night jazz
“American Songbook” on our local NPR-with-jazz station is playing Cole Porter as sung by Ella Fitzgerald.
To quote Xander Harris, there is no bad here.
*swoonariffic*
Our classical public radio station plays choral music on Sunday mornings between eight and nine, usually sacred. This morning it was “Media Vita” by John Shepard, performed by the Tallis Scholars: early English Renaissance (pronounce that “reh-NAY-sahnss”), with lots of high treble. Oh. Baby. Yes.
A delightful quote
Time: God Knows
Place: Bed
Claudio Monteverdi, Vespro della Beata Virgine
Having fallen asleep with my nose literally in a book, before remembering to either deactivate the beeper or turn off the radio, I am woken at some preposterous hour to this magnificent bit of music. It’s like an Italian Renaissance basilica in sound form, full of space and light, awe-inspiring yet profoundly peaceful. My first thought is that I have died and, to my disturbingly deep surprise, gone to heaven. Then the beeper goes off, and I realise that it is only Radio 3.
Guitar Love
Well, I picked up my guitar last night for the first time in months. I did it primarily because my husband was late getting home and I had the jitters, but I had been thinking about it and wanting to play for several days. It was good. It was very good. Two tunes and I felt like I had crevices in my fingers, but I enjoyed it. Then the hubby got home–turned out he was held up in conversation with a neighbor right outside our building–and we played some music together, which was even better.
My guitar is a very fine instrument, of which I am Not Worthy. It is a 1992 Gibson Southern Jumbo, which is an exact repreoduction of the 1942 Southern Jumbo, a big-hipped acoustic guitar with a full, rich, round sound. And it smells good, too. I loved the smell of that wood in my nostrils as I was playing, stumbling through easy reels like “King of the Fairies” and our Brubeckized version of “The Butterfly”. The 1942 S.J. had some variations in the materials due to wartime shortages, and the ’92 reproduces them–the fretboard is rosewood, for example, and the pick guard is an unusual flame pattern, black and deep amber-red waves, sort of like the colors of a calico cat. Hah–it just occurred to me that the instrument is ten years old this year! I haven’t owned it the whole time, however.
The husband of a friend in my husband’s choir (not his church choir but the amateur group he was running when we met) was selling this Gibson. His wife said, “He knows three tunes, and he has four guitars. I told him he had to sell one of them.” I bought this beauty from him for $900, a total steal, and paid for it in installments. It is the first and only guitar I have ever loved. I learned to play some on a classical guitar as a teenager. I occasionally fooled around with a couple of Martins owned by friends. But the first time I picked this Gibson up and held it in my arms, I wanted it. I adored the way it sounded, the way it felt. It was True Love.
I had a good time last night playing against my husband’s rosewood recorder. The rosewood recorder and the guitar with the rosewood fretboard were a match made in heaven. My Gibson has such a big sound that she tends to overwhelm the other instruments, but this recorder was man enough for her. *g* I look forward to playing more in the near future.
