Made in Thailand: Composed in America

Last week on Monday I was over at mae's1 house helping her clean out her kitchen while we were listening to the late Suthep Wongkamhaeng2 (สุเทพ วงศ์กำแหง), one of mae's favorites. As I was drying dishes, a song came up in the playlist and mae said she used to sing it to me as a …

on singing while playing the cello (part 6: singing in multiple styles)

At one of the last Sulh Ensemble rehearsals before the social distancing we read through some Balkan tunes that I used to play in other groups. I had forgotten how wonderful some of those tunes are, and at the same time had forgotten some of the pronunciation of Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian. While listening to …

Interview answers for an Arabic Music thesis project by Ribal El Kallab

A couple weeks ago I was approached by Lebanese cellist, Ribal El Kallab, to answer some questions for a thesis project on Arabic music that he is working on. I've been given permission to post his questions and my responses. If you are interested in my general background in music from the Arabic and Middle …

When are too many bands a thing?

Six years ago, I wrote a post called the perils of having too many bands... and at the time I thought I was coming to an upper limit, but little did I understand our capacity to reorganize time when pressed. The image above is a collage of many of the groups I've had the pleasure …

Unexpected non-standard cello techniques

Several years ago I came across George Dennehy, the boy who played the cello with his feet because he was born without arms and hands.  Every once in a while I'd take a look to see what other disabled folks are doing with the cello (or other instruments) since I have a driving curiosity to learn …

Survivorship Bias: Why classical musicians might not want to think like rock bands

This is going to be the first in a series of posts exploring narrow ideas of "Success" in discussions from some Classical Music Crisis folks. Survivorship bias also flash-freezes your brain into a state of ignorance from which you believe success is more common than it truly is and therefore you leap to the conclusion …

on dancing while playing the cello (part 3: Performers as Co-Creators)…

A recent piece by  Sugar Vendil titled Performers as Co-Creators at NewMusicBox discusses a current piece using musicians as dancers and brings up many of the issues I've discussed in my previous two installments of this on dancing while playing the cello series. The Nouveau Classical Project is developing a piece, Potential Energies, which will …

The Locust and the Wookiee Cellist Phenotypes

An intriguing piece David Dobbs at Aeon Magazine is basically a rallying call to put to rest the supremacy of genes as the primary or sole driver of evolution. Dobbs begins the piece by describing a talk he attended at a neuroscience convention by Steve Rogers (no, not Steve "Captain America" Rogers) of Cambridge University which …

Boldly going where no cellist has gone before…

Since I mainly write about the economic and cultural side of music here I decided to start a tumblr blog just for my cello (and other) performance related activities.  It's here: http://boldcellist.tumblr.com/ Since I get to do so many activities that most people wouldn't associate with the cello and being a cellist, I thought it …

The Cello in Video Game Music

And no, I'm not talking about some of the marketing imagery that can be found on, say, the London Philharmonic Orchestra's recent release of "The Greatest Video Game Music" which features a cello on the cover (albeit, played by a special ops troop ostensibly from one of the video game scores featured on the album). …

R.I.P. János Starker

There's really nothing I can add to all the litanies, and many more cellists and musicians have had a much closer professional and personal relationship than I ever had the chance.  My closest contact with him was when I was 15 and played the Dvořák Cello Concerto (which was something tied to his early claim …

Sunday Spotlight on the Non-Western Cello: Indonesian Keroncong Cellos

Some time ago I posted about a style of music in Indonesia called Keroncong.  In the image above you can see that a luthier is working on a Keroncong Selo (Cello), most of have three strings since the instrument is used as a plucked, rather than bowed instrument.  The video I posted in the previous …

on dancing while playing the cello… (part 2: Music as Choreography)

In my previous post I talked about the Choreography of the Mouth when learning how to sing in multiple langauges and mentioned I would post about Music as Choreography.  Here is that post.  As I said previously: It’s simply about the choreography of the mouth (my next post will talk about Music as Choreography) which …

on singing while playing the cello (part 5: singing in multiple languages)…

One of the questions I often get after shows is how I manage to sing in so many languages. Even for those who do regularly sing this can seem like a herculean task, but really it isn't. Singing while playing doesn't come naturally to me and I've never had the type of training that most …

Indonesia Cello and Kroncong Ensembles

While doing an image search for "insect cellos" I came across this image (below) of a kroncong ensemble which has a cello in it. Quick reading shows that this folk ensemble has its origins in Portuguese influence during the 16th century and has evolved into what it is today.  Obviously, what's I'm most interested in …

on singing while playing the cello (part 4)…

Last weekend (Friday, Oct. 26) I did a show opening for Frenchy and the Punk with my project, Secondhand.  I sang two tunes during our set: one in Romanian and one in Azerbaijani.  Really gorgeous tunes that I love to sing.  The next evening (Saturday) I played a Sci-Fi Convention, Utopia Con, with my Klingon …

Yo-Yo Ma playing ‘Appalachia Waltz’ with DePauw students

http://www.facebook.com/v/10150415619203513 Here's a video I took of Mr. Ma playing Mark O'Connor's Appalachia Waltz with DePauw students at The Hub (the centralized non-dorm food court on the DePauw campus).  This was supposed to something of a flash mob event though before any of the music students, much less Mr. Ma, arrived, there were already several …

Modern Cello Techniques

  Modern Cello Techniques is a fantastic new website dedicated to extended cello techniques by Chicago based cellist, Russell Rolen.  Of special interest to my blog readers who also are interested in Arabic and Turkish music, there is a section on Quartertones and a page with some samples from usage of them by Western classical …